Today's Reading
INTRODUCTION
David Hilbert could solve some of the most complex mathematical equations ever conjured, but he simply couldn't wrap his head around the views of his fellow faculty members. In the spring of 1915, Professor Hilbert attempted to recruit a former student to teach alongside him at the University of Göttingen, Germany. This person had been teaching math for seven years at the University of Erlangen, but Hilbert coveted their brilliance for his own department.
And brilliant they were. This mathematician would go on to create modern algebra as we know it. Fellow Jewish academic Albert Einstein would come to refer to them as "the most significant creative mathematical genius." If Einstein is calling you a genius, you know it must be true.
But some of Göttingen's professors didn't care how brilliant this potential addition to their university was; all that mattered was that Emmy Noether was a woman, and that meant she couldn't be a university lecturer.
Silly girl. Didn't she know that universities were for men? That math was for boys? Why, what would the mostly male student body think?
"What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?" the faculty demanded.
Hilbert was livid. He knew Noether's astonishing mathematical mind could be nothing but a great gift to the students of Göttingen. "I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission as privatdozent [lecturer]," he fumed in response. "After all, we are a university, not a bathhouse!"
A similarly incensed Einstein offered to intercede on her behalf, but in the end, he didn't need to. Hilbert hired her anyway under the auspices of being his assistant. She even began giving lectures, although her work went unpaid, of course.
Today, such work would be called volunteer, but at the time, women had to grin and bear such positions as a way to get their foot in the door. Apparently, it was audacious for women to expect remuneration for their work in academia.
"It wouldn't have done any harm to the Göttingen Feldgrauen [soldiers] if they had been sent to school with Fräulein Nöther," Einstein quipped. "She seems to know her craft well!"
Within a few years, Noether showed the world just how well she'd mastered her craft. In 1918, she solved the mathematical problem presented by Einstein's new theory of relativity that even the man himself hadn't been able to puzzle out. Her theorem was pivotal to the development of modern physics and forever altered our conception of the universe. Surely, this would prove she was good enough to be a professor.
Finally, in 1919, Noether became the first woman in Germany allowed to achieve habilitation, the official certification required to teach at the university level. To mark the occasion, the stuffy Göttingen faculty conceded "a woman's mind is capable of being creative in mathematics only in exceptional cases."1
Noether's experience is the perfect illustration of what it was like for most women in Germany attempting to make inroads in the boys' club of academia in the early twentieth century. Brilliant women were long seen as remarkable, singular cases, not as an example of what women in general were capable of when given the same education and opportunities as men. Your genius was neither here nor there; only your gender mattered.
Math and science were especially difficult disciplines for women to crack. While lone women occasionally fought their way into some of these more analytical subjects, it wasn't until the first decades of the 1900s that we finally saw a major push for women to be more widely accepted in science professions.
While Noether paved the way for women mathematicians in Germany, Lise Meitner, Hedwig Kohn, Hertha Sponer, and Hildegard Stücklen were among those who helped usher in what was essentially the first generation of women physicists.
Tragically, their careers were cut short just as they were getting established. When Hitler took power in 1933, he ruthlessly stomped all over this progress by enacting policies excluding Jewish people and their supporters from civil service employment, and essentially barring women from such work. The Nazis also restricted the number of women who could enroll in universities and forbade women from pursuing certification to teach at universities.
"During the National Socialist years, women were de facto excluded from academic careers,"2 explains economics professor Elisabeth Allgoewer.
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