The house where Emmy lived

Yesterday Paul Halpern at PACHS posted a nice short piece with a photo of the grave stone of the German mathematician Emmy Noether at Bryn Mawr College. As I wrote in an earlier post I (almost) live in Emmy’s home town and actually studied mathematics at the same university so having seen where her life ended I thought it would be nice to show some photos of where it started.

Emmy was born in this house on the Hauptstraße in Erlangen

The plaque next to the door reads

Birthplace of the Mathematician

EMMY

NOETHER

Born 23.3.1882 Emigrated 1933

Died 14.4.1935 Bryn Mawr

Because her father was Professor of Mathematics at the university she was allowed to study mathematics there unusual for a woman at that time.

The Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg was founded in 1742 in Bayreuth and moved to Erlangen in 1743. From 1801 the administration moved into this building where it still resides.

Emmy would have attended her lectures in the then still relatively new Kollegen Haus, which was built in 1889

She would have also crossed the road to study in the then new (now old) university library

Which looks like this from the side

The concrete bunker across the road at the end of the street in the new library

(It was in the old library that John Wilkins, the Aussie Anthropoid, and I got to see the plant drawings of Conrad Gesner when he came to visit me)

All of these universty building are within a couple of hundred metres of Emmy’s birthplace so she didn’t have far to go to do her studies. Emmy is one of the greatest 20th century mathematicians and deserves to be much better known than she is.