The Noether Theorems as Seen by Contemporaries and by Historians of Science

Abstract

In 1918 in Göttingen, Klein was certainly the most senior and important member of the faculty, Hilbert was a dominant, internationally acknowledged mathematician, whileWeyl was a slightly younger contemporary of Noether whose outstanding talent was already recognized. Einstein was a celebrity, then residing in Berlin, whose work was being followed closely in Göttingen. We shall review the way in which Noether’s achievements were perceived and acknowledged by each of them at the time, before analyzing later testimonies to her work as a mathematician and the extremely modest role assigned to her early work up to and including the Invariante Variationsprobleme.