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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

The title "mighty mathematician you've never heard of" is odd. Aren't most "mighty mathematicians" people we've never heard of?

It isn't surprising people in the mainstream have never heard of her. Virtually everything she did was abstract algebra and the only connection her work had to real life was studying some invariants of relativity (read: very high level, very specialized). Similarly, how many people have heard of Sierpinski, Voronoy or even Hilbert?

While important, the sort of work she did doesn't lead you to fame. As an applied mathematician I never directly used any of her theorems. The word "ring" (let alone "noetherian") doesn't even appear in my thesis.

There is only one famous mathematician in the world. His name is "that crazy guy played by Russel Crowe".

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I learned Sierpinski's name in high school (he had a pretty carpet, don't you know); I'm pretty sure I learned Hilbert's name from a Nova episode at around the same time.

I first heard Noether's name last year, I think, from some article like this one. Of course, the notion that "where there is a symmetry, there is a conservation principle" came up half a dozen times during my physics/EE Ph.D. studies, but nobody ever suggested that this might be a theorem with a name, let alone the name of Noether.

Your point is well taken, though. A major reason why the female scientists and mathematicians of history are largely invisible, unless you make an effort to see them, is that all scientists and mathematicians are invisible to first order. To get your name out there, even to fans of such things, you have to do a bunch of self-promotion. And self-promotion is a nonlinear endeavor: A little additional friction – from, say, having to lurk quietly at the back of lecture halls and slink in and out the back door of the office, lest you be forced to defend your very presence from a handful of people who are made uncomfortable by it – and you're behind in the fame game.

On the contrary, I think being a woman probably helped Noether's fame. Off the top of my head, I can think of precisely two algebraists: the woman (Noether) and the guy who was killed in a duel (Galois).

Niels Abel is an obvious third.

I was hoping someone would mention him. His life story though, like Galois, is a painful read; just when his work was beginning to get recognized, he had contracted a fatal disease (TB).

So you think that being a woman helped her fame, when the whole point of the report was how little she is known, even in many mathematics circles?

As other commenters have mentioned, she probably isn't as unknown as the article suggests. I'd have thought that her symmetry work is pretty well-known in the field of Physics, and credited under her name.

I'm not a mathematician by any stretch, but am a reasonably well-qualified geek. I've run across Sirpinski, Voronoy, Hilbert, Nash, and quite a few other mathematicians in my day (mostly on account of being a bit of a Mandelbrot groupie as a teenager -- I met him once after a lecture, and he seemed baffled by the existence of teenaged groupies...) -- but I've never run across Noether before. She sounds pretty incredible, and I'm grateful to have read this article.

I'm sure you're correct that mathematicians will never be truly "famous" amongst the general public, except to the extent that they're played by Russel Crowe. But my own experience would suggest that Noether could use a bit more exposure within the non-mathematician general-purpose geek populace.

There is at least one more famous mathematician: Isaac Newton. But that proves your point. How many average people could identify anyone else, even Euclid?

Newton a famous mathematician? I know he was, but the general public will only know him as a physicist.

I guess most who do know him as a mathematician also know Leibniz.

As a mathematician, Pythagoras probably is way better known than Newton.

Newton is a famous mathematician in the same way that Jesus is a famous Jew.

Surely most everybody who has been to high school has at the very least heard of calculus?

Also, it strongly depends on where in the world you ask, many Londoners will have heard of Christopher Wren for instance. And loads of people know of classical mathematicians such as Archimedes and Da Vinci. Also you get the crossovers such as people like Ada Lovelace, who will be known to many fans of Byron.

Gauss? Pascal? Descartes? Russell? Fermat? Knuth?

You probably need to take a survey.

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