Re: Mileva Maric - any educated opions?

From: David Evens (devens_at_technologist.com)
Date: 10/30/04 

Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 03:43:42 -0400

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 21:00:49 GMT, "greywolf42"
<mingstb@marssim-ss.com> wrote:
>"robert j. kolker" <nowhere@nowhere.net> wrote in message
>news:2u2e0mF20tordU1@uni-berlin.de...
>>
>> greywolf42 wrote:
>>
>> > Her name was Emmy, not Emily. I know that many Relativists mistake her
>> > name. But then some also think that "Noether" was a man. Because even
>> > modern bigots have a hard time believing that women can do math.
>> >
>http://www.google.com/groups?selm=YqoC6.1342%2405.1408307%40nntp1.onemain.co
>> > m
>>
>> From a biographical site.
>>
>> Emmy Amalie Noether
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>------
>>
>> Born: 23 March 1882 in Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany
>> Died: 14 April 1935 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, USA
>>
>> the URL is
>>
>> http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Noether_Emmy.html
>>
>> Emily is just the English way of spelling Amilie.
>
>LOL! Billy was trying for her first name, not her middle name.
>
>What's the "English" way of spelling "Emmy?" What's the "English"
>way of spelling "Noether?"
>
>The "English" spelling of Einstein is "One Mug".

As expected, no coherent response.

>> It was symptomatic of the time that men resented women in the
>> mathematics profession.
>
>It's also obviously the same with Relativists up to today.

Why are you calling yourself a 'Relativist'?

>> David Hilbert had to lecture his men students at
>> Geottingen to remind them that it was a university and not a locker
>> room. Hilbert made it possible for Emmy Amalie Noether to teach at
>> Geottingen where she made many important contributions. Her theorem
>> associating the symmetries of the Langrangian density functional with
>> conserved quantities is of the utmost importance in physics. She also
>> made many other contributions to algebra.
>
>And what might Mileva Maric have done, with Hilbert's favor?

Not much, since she flunked out fair and square.

>> Emmy Amilie Noether had to leave Germany in 1933 because she was a Jew.
>> Germany's loss was Brynmawr's gain when she came to the U.S. to teach.
>>
>> In spite of Hilbert's lectures many of the men at the university
>> referred to her as Das Noether, a rather unflattering use of the neutral
>> definite article in German. Emmy Amilie Noether did not possess feminine
>> physical beauty in any great amount. So she was referred to abusively.
>
>The only reason that Relativists even know Emmy Noether's name is because of
>one theorem that Einstein thought supported his case. Otherwise, they
>simply resent her.

She came up with one theorem commonly used in classical EM theory and
classical mechanics because it prooves that any field that has any of
a specific set of properties has all of them, and these properties are
very physically significant.

>> > Or you have a male patron in the power structure, who likes the answers
>> > you get.
>> >
>> > But if you have a male opponent in the power structure (for whatever
>> > reason), you are SOL. Even today. Look at the 1974 nobel prize for
>> > discovery of a the first neutron star (in the Crab nebula). The
>discovery
>> > was made by Jocelyn Bell. The award (and all the credit) was given to
>> > Hewish, when Hewish had nothing to do with the work or ideas. He simply
>> > "owned" the radio telescope and the position of power.
>> > http://scienceweek.com/2004/sc040611-1.htm
>>
>> A wretched happening. A similar thing happened to Rosalyn Franklin who
>> was as instrumental as Watson and Crick in the discovery of DNA. It was
>> her expertise in X-Ray diffraction imaging that spotted the double
>> helix. Watson and Crick did not give her any of the credit she deserved.
>
>So, the problem was not limited to ancient history.

No, it still existed a generation or two ago.

Not that expertise in X-ray crystalography was something rare and
unusual like Noether's mathematical genius. Determining the structure
of complex organics was something that was being done on a regular
basis at the time, although it was very tedious since there were very
few computers available, so most of the time the data had to be
analysed by hand, limiting how complex a pattern could be usefully
worked on. There were, however, any number of people who could have
done it. Even Watson and Crick wouldn't have gotten the Prize for
working out the sturture alone. I've read the paper where they
announce it, and their prize is really for an almost off-hand remark
that they make in the second last paragraph, where they note that the
two strands are complimentary and that you can recreate the one strand
using the other as template. This was the interesting and important
bit.

>> >>And to also
>> >>be fair it is often remarked that unless you are that damn good
>> >>mathematics would probably get by quite well without you -
>> >>of course that is small comfort to the promising careers it
>> >>snuffed out and the attendant heartbreak.
>> >
>> > How many Milevas and Srinivasas (Ramanujan) have we lost, because they
>> > were the wrong color or wrong sex? Or just had the wrong ideas? Or had
>> > someone more accepted by the power structure grab the credit?
>>
>> Ramanujan was not lost. G.H.Hardy found him and brought him to
>> Cambridge.
>
>Hardy dragged him away from his home and culture. Simply to raise the
>status of himself and his institution. And the English weather and food
>slowly killed Ramanujan. Because "good" old Hardy couldn't believe that
>Ramanujan could do math in India. Ramanujan had to be 'converted' to an
>Englishman.

By doing what was generally viewed with envy by the other students
that didn't make it, of course. Incidentally, they still have this
sort of thing in India to this day. Indians are no dummies. They
keep things they got from the British when they work, and drop the
things that don't.

>> To this day mathematicians are mining treasures from his work.
>
>They could have done this just as well if "good old" Hardy had left
>Ramanujan in India. It is more likely that there would be far more to
>"mine" if Hardy had.

Why would there be more to mine if there had been far less work done?

>> I would rate him in the top five mathematicians of the post
>> Alexandrian era (from about 100 c.e. to the present). Ramanujan was not
>> mistreated but he was not fully appreciated and understood.
>
>In other words, he *was* mistreated, because he had the wrong skin color and
>didn't parrot the standard line.

What cause you to make that halucination, other than your racial the
the British?

>> His mind did
>> not run in conventional linear-logical manner so it was hard for more
>> conventional mathematicians to figure out just how he got his results.
>> Ramanujan did not always use picture perfect logic in deriving his
>> theorems but he was rarely wrong.
>>
>> It is not clear how good Mileva was. Her career was done in by marriage
>> and motherhood. One can speculate but one will never know.
>
>In part, because many letters of hers were deliberately destroyed by
>Einstein's estate.

You mean like almost every letter anybody ever wrote to Albert about
anything? Almost all the letters we have that were written TO Albert
are ones that he gave to other people to keep, most of them being
letters that he enclosed with his responses to them because he refered
to them so frequently that he felt it was required for his
correspondent to fully understand what he was saying. There can
readily be seen to be two reasons for this: The correspondence that
existed before he emigrated to the US would have almost all been lost
in any even because he stayed in the US after the Nazis raided his
house in Germany (Albert having wisely legged it after the murder of a
close friend finnally got it through his rather thick skull that these
guys really were out to KILL him and his). In his latter years,
Albert was notoriously absent-minded. He had to run tabs at the
dinner he had breakfast at most working days (being a scientists, this
means just about every day he wasn't seriously unwell) and the shops
he would often visit on the way in to work, allong with some
clothes...as he would often go to pay for something and discover that
he had forgotten his wallet in the pant...he had forgotten to put on
that morning.

>> Whereas with Emmy Amilie Noether there is not doubt whatsoever of her
>> talent. She proved herself in a rather hostile environment. Another
>> female physicist, Lisa Meitner was also under estimated. She had two
>> things going against her; her gender and the fact she was Jewish. She
>> had to get out of Germany to save her skin. Never the less Otto Hahn had
>> the gall to pick her brains even while she was in exile. Meitner had as
>> much as anyone to do with the discovery of a sustainable fissioning
>> process for uranium.
>
>Then why do we not hear her name, instead of Hahn and Fermi?

Actually, we don't hear Hahn's name to much anymore. Fermi is famous,
in part, for having been one of the people who was in the atomic bomb
program from early on, having actually done some of the labour (and
here I speak of physical labour, in this case doing things like
machining graphite blocks) on the first nuclear pile at Chicago.

On the other hand, we hear Noether's name a LOT, since we call the
theorem she developed that actually gets used a lot in physics
Noether's Theorem. Everyone who studies physics at university level
knows it, just like everyone knows Einstein, Newton, Galileo, and a
host of others.