The Physical Jew

[Alex K]

Even though she wasn't even a physicist by training,

Emmy Noether

discovered the most important theorem in all of theoretical physics on which literally everything in physics nowadays is based. And that wasn't even her main line of work - she was busy being one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century, and the famed Noether theorem was kind of a side project to her. It links the existence of conserved quantities such as energy, momentum, charge etc. to symmetries in nature. This deep insight made it possible to construct all of modern physics based on symmetry principles, i.e. what the guys in my last post based all their stuff on. She was denied a proper academic position because she was a woman, but fortunately David Hilbert, the most important mathematician of the 20th century, recognized her genius and worked in her favor. When the Nazis gained power, she fled from Göttingen to the US and became a professor at Bryn Mawr college. Her and other Jewish mathematicians' departure from Göttingen basically wiped out what was then the most important center of mathematics research in the entire world.