Emmy Noether

German mathematician Albert Einstein called the most significant creative mathematical genius produced since women began higher education. Working at Gottingen for years without pay or formal faculty rank, owing to institutional resistance to women academics, she transformed abstract algebra by developing the general theory of ideals and rings that underlies the subject today. In 1915 she proved what is now called Noether's theorem, showing that every continuous symmetry of a physical system corresponds to a conserved quantity, a result foundational to modern theoretical physics as much as to mathematics. Dismissed from her Gottingen position in 1933 as Jewish under Nazi racial laws, she emigrated to the United States and taught at Bryn Mawr College until her death two years later.