Odd People
Emmy Noether
Her lectures were announced under someone else's name
Göttingen would not give her a post. Hilbert advertised the lectures under his own name and put her at the lectern.
To lecture at a German university a woman needed habilitation, and the faculty refused. The argument was that if women entered the teaching body, returning soldiers would find themselves taught by a woman.
Hilbert is said to have replied that he did not see why the candidate's sex was an issue: this is a university, not a bathhouse.
The vote failed anyway. So Hilbert announced the lectures under his own name and Noether delivered them, for several terms.
In 1933 the Nazi regime removed Jewish academics from the universities. She went to the United States and taught at Bryn Mawr, and died two years later of complications after surgery, aged fifty-three.
Einstein, writing to the New York Times, called her the most significant creative mathematical genius since the higher education of women began.
The question that remainsIf the person who proved that symmetry produces conservation could not get her own name on a lecture list — where exactly is scholarship conserved?