Context and sources: Emmy Noether at Bryn Mawr

I received an invitation to take up a research professorship in Bryn Mawr for one year (1933-34), which I accepted for the following 1934-35. I don’t have an answer to that yet, but I think that the postponement—I can’t be in England and America at the same time—won’t cause any problems. The scholarship comes jointly from Rockefeller and the Committee “in Aid of Displaced German Scholars.” Bryn Mawr is, by the way, another women’s college, but as Veblen wrote to me later, the best of them; and also so close to Princeton that I should come over often.

The people here are all very accommodating and have a natural warmth that makes you feel like you know them right away, even if it doesn’t go very deep. You get invited as often as you like; I’ve also met all sorts of interesting people who aren’t part of the college. Incidentally, I’m doing a seminar here with three “girls"—they’re rarely called students—and a lecturer, and they’re currently reading the first volume of van der Waerden with enthusiasm, an enthusiasm that goes as far as working through all the tasks—certainly not expected of me. … In addition, Miss Taussky is probably coming here with a Bryn Mawr scholarship.

There are a number of interested people in Princeton this year; … next time, Miss Taussky, who comes along from time to time, is supposed to give the simplest number theory examples. She held a dress rehearsal here; I am doing the same here, tailored to women, i.e., the girls are making up for what is lacking in independence with an industriousness that I find unbelievable – there are two other people with scholarships this year in addition to Miss Taussky.

When I left for Bryn Mawr [in 1934], my speaking knowledge of English was extremely poor, but I took a few lessons from an English lady who claimed that she knew no German at all. She was not an educated lady, but she certainly was a gifted teacher, for she got me to speak English. …

I had never before lived at a college like Bryn Mawr. In European universities, nobody bothers about a student outside of teaching. … Emmy Noether, who had arrived there a year earlier on a Rockefeller fellowship, was very happy there; she liked the girls and they treated her well. She became interested in the life of girl students, probably for the first time in her life. … She had not done a great deal of systematic teaching in her life…

Miss Noether had been quite happy at Bryn Mawr in her first year. She studied van der Warden’s first volume on algebra with students and staff members. But by the time I arrived there at the start of her second year I did not find her in a very good mood. She had been back in Göttingen during the summer and had arranged for all her belongings to be shipped to the US. She had found everything very difficult in Göttingen, and she had not yet found a position for the next year in the US…

During that year she had tried to work with us on some seminar notes prepared by Hasse on class field theory. She had one of the graduate students write a thesis under her on normal bases in fields. Another young woman there, as a fellow, wrote a paper on work suggested by her. She spent some time advising Deuring, her former student in Göttingen, on his Ergebnisse volume on algebras. Altogether, we were four women working with her…

Although to me, coming from a poverty-stricken country, much of life at Bryn Mawr seemed quite luxurious, and coming from a European university the attention students received practically brought tears to my eyes – remembering the tough time I had in my student days—nevertheless, life at that time was far from carefree. The depression was in full swing. … Some of the students in other subjects did not appear to be rolling in money.

In 1934 the college was able to invite me too for the academic year 1934-1935, an invitation now much more profitable because of Emmy’s presence. I was to receive a scholarship for foreign students, a position rather poor from the financial point of view. … So after several hardships in my career things were looking up again. I was busy with various duties to the last moment, took some hurried lessons in English, and then took off, arriving at Bryn Mawr in late September in the afternoon. In the evening, one of the graduate students, Ruth Stauffer, took me to Emmy. … The best time both of us had together was when I accompanied her to Princeton where she gave a lecture every Tuesday, traveling there early morning and returning late in the evening. I did not always accompany her because of the expensive fare. But when I did she seemed to enjoy my company and we talked in the train and while waiting at Princeton Junction or in Philadelphia. We discussed work and many other things.

My trips to Princeton were the highlights of that year. … Emmy’s Princeton lectures Tuesdays were a repeat of what she worked out with us at Bryn Mawr on Mondays. She somehow used us as a rehearsal. … We were quite a small group. There was her PhD student Ruth Stauffer (McKee) who worked with her on normal bases in fields and was her favorite. … There was Grace Shover (Quinn) who had been trained in abstract algebra by MacDuffee and had worked on ideals and class numbers in algebras. Then there was the oldest and most settled of us, the late Marie Weiss, a student of Manning who had worked on multiply transitive permutation groups.

First let me tell you how it was with us at Bryn Mawr that first year. As I remember there were five of us who had never been exposed to any abstract algebra. She started by giving us a short assignment in the first volume of Van der Waerden’s Moderne Algebren.

There were four of us students: Marie Weiss had come from teaching at Newcomb College, Tulane University, having studied with Manning at Stanford, to accept the Emmy Noether Scholarship; Olga Taussky had postponed a grant from Girton College, Cambridge, and had come from a research post in Göttingen to take advantage of the opportunity to study with Miss Noether on the Bryn Mawr Foreign Scholarship; Ruth Stauffer was continuing her studies on a Bryn Mawr scholarship leading to the doctorate; and myself. We not only studied together, attended Miss Noether’s and Mrs. Wheeler’s lectures also, but we really played together, walking down Gulph Road with Miss Noether in the lead discussing mathematics intensely all the while unmindful of the traffic or birding through the woods with Mrs. Wheeler, binoculars in hand, attending teas hosted by department chair Mrs. Wheeler in her comfortable Low Buildings faculty apartment or even by one of us in her own room in the graduate dormitory, Radnor Hall. … Since writing the above I have been reminded that Mrs. Wheeler referred an undergraduate to Olga for special instruction on a project.

Although Noether had been promised only graduate and post-doctoral students, since Elizabeth Monroe had completed Bryn Mawr’s upper level mathematics courses by the end of her junior year, Noether agreed to provide special reading assignments and problems for her. Elizabeth was told that she wasn’t to bother the great mathematician. She told me that her own social skills weren’t too great, so she never felt anything other than awe and intimidation in the presence of Dr. Noether. Noether provided ever-more-difficult problems, graded them, and provided another set. No further communication was needed.

In April of Elizabeth’s senior year, Noether suddenly died, and Elizabeth was given to Olga Taussky (later Todd). Elizabeth found her a much more approachable teacher, and enjoyed the change. There had been no admonitions not to talk with her new mentor, so, Elizabeth observed to me decades later, the difference in her relationship to the two women may have been entirely her own responsibility.

Emmy Noether’s arrival had been arranged. She was essentially a refugee, but her arrival and reception at Bryn Mawr had been arranged by the department. They were quite pleased to have her come. Their primary purpose was to give her an environment in which she could continue her creative research in fairly abstract forms of mathematics and work somewhat with graduate students. But [Professor of Mathematics] Bill [Flexner] had persuaded Anna Pell Wheeler, who was the head of the Department of Mathematics, to allow me to take a half unit throughout the year of honors work with Emmy Noether. I had by that time passed my orals in French and German. … The orals in French and German were required of every Bryn Mawr graduate as a demonstration that she could read French or German to a level which permitted some scholarly research. …

Emmy Noether arrived on the Bryn Mawr campus sometime before the opening of my senior year, which was in the fall of 1934, obviously. She spoke no English. That was no problem for Anna Pell Wheeler, who spoke fluent German, but it was a problem for me because I did not speak fluent German. I had been warned by Bill Flexner that Emmy Noether was a very lofty personage, on whose time I shouldn’t expect to trespass. And that continental university traditions about the relations between students and professors were such that the professors expected the students to do a good deal on their own and not bother the professors too much – and that all this business of frequent conferences in the library or in the professor’s offices was something I shouldn’t expect from her.

So, I went into this bit not quite knowing what I was getting in for, until I went to see Emmy Noether. Between us, I managed to understand the following. She handed me a bright yellow book which was called Moderne Algebra by B. L. van der Waerden. At any rate, this was a book on the abstract forms of algebra, not the kind you get in high school. She told me that I should sit down and study this. … I took the book home and I read enough German, so that I could follow it along. Then, as each new term was introduced, it was defined in German, but I could understand. And a lot of it, of course, was in formulas, equations and so forth and using symbols, which of course was familiar. … I decided that if I was going to sit down and read this book, which took [a while]... I would say that I could digest two or three pages in an hour. That’s the nature of the compactness of the language, not of the German language but of the algebraic [one]. So, I decided that if I was going to do this and it was supposed to be a half-unit course and so forth, that I better just decide to spend a certain amount of time each week doing it and pace myself that way. … I made myself work at it as if I were going to a lecture and to take notes and progress along. And I seemed to manage pretty well, and I didn’t think there was anything that I needed to ask Emmy about. Come January or so, Anna Pell Wheeler gently conveyed to professor Noether that she had to provide a grade for me. So, I was summoned into her presence, and we had a little discussion. …

By that time Emmy had begun to pick up a little English. It was a combination of my perhaps understanding her German and answering her in English, I suppose. At any rate, she told me that there were some problems in the back of the chapters, and I should go and pick out some of those problems to do and come back. So, I did them. It was possible for me to do them almost entirely symbolically. I didn’t have to write any German or English to do them. So, I did them and apparently I did them right, particularly when you can choose the ones you’re going to do. So, I was duly scooted through with an “A” for the first semester in that, and nobody gave the matter much thought.

However, come the end of March, spring vacation, and Emmy Noether was taken ill. She had a … tumor of which she died in something like three weeks. So, I found myself in the middle of April with graduation one month away—six weeks at the most—with no major professor, and no one but myself knowing what I had been doing. I found myself further in the situation that I could not discuss what I had been doing with anyone, because I didn’t know enough German to say it in German and I didn’t have the English words for all that mathematical stuff that I had been doing. So, I was somewhat nonplussed.

Well, Anna Pell Wheeler was resourceful, and she recruited a gal named Olga Taussky, who was a Czech who already had her PhD in mathematics, but who [had] come to Bryn Mawr to work on a postdoctoral level with Emmy Noether. Olga Taussky was also an algebraist. Olga Taussky’s English was not much better than Emmy Noether’s and my Czech was nil. But we met and she did a rather ingenious thing. She said: “Here is a theorem, which I know is true because it has been proven by non-algebraic methods, but to the best of my knowledge no one has ever proven it using algebraic methods. I would suggest that you do this as an original exercise.” So, I undertook to try to do that.

She and I met several times. I asked her questions, and we had conversations about it. Then, I remember a terrible panic that occurred about three or four days—it seemed to me—before this final thing had to be in. I had worked it all through and I had written it all up. Fortunately, it was in relatively few pages. Then, I suddenly realized that I had made a mistake fairly early in the development of the whole damn thing. I was panicky. I was staying awake nights. Bryn Mawr European Fellow, I’m not. So, I eventually patched it up and it was accepted and processed and all the rest of it.