(April 1, 2012 at 12:26 am)Categories+Sheaves Wrote: This post is primarily about spreading the NYT article here.
For some reason, Sophie Germain tends to be one of the first examples of women in math. I think this is stupid. She has a nice story, and she was a good mathematician, but she didn't do anything really impressive. We wouldn't be talking about her if she wasn't a woman. I understand that it's important for women to have a role model in mathematics. I just think they can do better.
And by "do better" I mean "look to Emmy Noether instead". She was great. I mean, we would count her as a great mathematician, even if she was a man. And for some reason, she isn't very well-known by people who haven't taken a course in commutative algebra, or stumbled across her theorem relating differentiable symmetries and conservation laws...
Even though she's the mother of modern algebra... the NYT sadly only spends a single sentence on her "groundbreaking results... ...in rarefied fields of abstract algebra and ring theory." This blogpost covers a bit more ground in that regard...
Bonus point: as somebody pointed out in the comments section of that blogpost, she also handed Alexandroff and Hopf the insight that led to Algebraic Topology's Homology Theory
In any case, somebody worth celebrating.
She is extremely boss. Kind of like a later Gauss (although less prolific than Gauss was in other fields).
“The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.”
