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Comment by jhales | Hacker News Reader

No doubt she is a very signifigant figure, but (Although you do qualify your statement later) I have to disagree with:

"If anything, the article probably understates her importance ..."

In the second paragraph of the first page the author subtly suggests that she is the greatest mathematician as well as the greatest physcicist (at least a bunch of her contemporaries, who are smarter than you, the reader, thought so).

Also, in my personal experience, she is quite well known.

I would add to your list of her accomplishments: I've been told that she was one of the first to push for Homology to be treated as groups and not simply just betti numbers.

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> Also, in my personal experience, she is quite well known.

True in my experience, also. My very first college math professor took 15 minutes out of lecture, in Calculus I, to tell us about her. He culminated by naming his dog after her, which I guess was his highest form of praise.

Don't get me wrong. Deriving conservation of energy from time invariance, conservation of momentum from linear translation invariance, etc. is totally cool. But it's not really accurate to say that she's not well-known.

> In the second paragraph of the first page the author subtly suggests that she is the greatest mathematician as well as the greatest physcicist (at least a bunch of her contemporaries, who are smarter than you, the reader, thought so).

This isn't quite what it says. That paragraphs talks about her being the most significant and creative female mathematician of all time, and attributes it to Einstein. That's a significant weaker statement, given how few women mathematicians there were before modern times.

Conversely, if the article had described her as the greatest mathematician and greatest physicist of all time, that would be a massive overstatement, of course.

What I was trying to get at here (and what Einstein probably was trying to convey to a lay audience, too) was that she was very (probably critically) important for the development of early 20th century mathematics, when many of the foundations of how we do mathematics today were laid, and that this was the case regardless of her gender.

I get what you are saying, one has to read between the lines a little, but if you read carefully I think that is what is implied:

"Albert Einstein called her the most “significant” and “creative” female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries were inclined to drop the modification by sex."

If you drop the female from that sentence then it reads "most significant and creative mathematician of all time."

Another point that, which I think you pointed out as well, was that this is a misquote of Einstein. The original statement included the clause 'since the education of women...' which would make the dropping of gender much more reasonable.

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