- MODERN EUROPEAN WOMEN 97
began in September 1939 they were on holiday in Switzerland, and there was real
fear that Switzerland would be invaded. Grace immediately returned to England,
but William stayed behind. The fall of France in 1940 enforced a long separation on
them. The health of William, who was by then in his late 70s, declined rapidly, and
he died in a nursing home in June 1942. Grace survived for nearly two more years,
dying in England in March 1944. Grattan-Guinness [1972, p. 181) has eloquently
characterized this remarkable woman:
She knew more than half a dozen languages herself, and in addition
she was a good mathematician, a virtually qualified medical doctor,
and in her spare time, pianist, poet, painter, author, Platonic and
Elizabethan scholar—and a devoted mother to all her children.
And in the blend of her roles as scholar and as mother lay the
fulfillment of her complicated personality.
Emmy Noether. Sof'ya Kovalevskaya and Grace Chisholm Young had had to im-
provise their careers, taking advantage of the opportunities that arose from time
to time. One might have thought that Amalie Emmy Noether was better situated
in regard to both the number of opportunities arising and the ability to take ad-
vantage of them. After all, she came a full generation later than Kovalevskaya, the
University of Gottingen had been awarding degrees to women for five years when
she enrolled, and she was the eldest child of the distinguished mathematician Max
Noether.^15 According to Dick (1981), on whose biography of her the following
account is based, she was born on March 23, 1882 in Erlangen, Germany, where her
father was a professor of mathematics. She was to acquire three younger brothers
in 1883, 1884, and 1889. Her childhood was quite a normal one for a girl of her day,
and at the age of 18 she took the examinations for teachers of French and English,
scoring very well. This achievement made her eligible to teach modern languages
at women's educational institutions. However, despite the difficulties women were
having at universities, as depicted by Gerhard Kowalewski, she decided to attend
the University of Erlangen. There she was one of only two women in the student
body of 986, and she was only an auditor, preparing simultaneously to take the
graduation examinations in Niirnberg. After passing these examinations, she went
to the University of Gottingen for one year, again not as a matriculated student. If
it seems strange that Grace Chisholm was allowed to matriculate at Gottingen and
Emmy Noether was not, the explanation seems to be precisely that Emmy Noether
was a German.
In 1904 she was allowed to matriculate at Erlangen, where she wrote a disserta-
tion under the direction of Paul Gordan (1837-1912). Gordan was a constructivist
and disliked abstract proofs. According to Kowalewski (1950, p. 25) he is said
to have remarked of one proof of the Hubert basis theorem, "That is no longer
mathematics; that is theology." In her dissertation Emmy Noether followed Gor-
dan's constructivist methods; but she was later to become famous for work done
from a much more abstract point of view. She received the doctorate summa cum
laude in 1907. Thus, she surmounted the first two obstacles to a career in math-
ematics with only a small amount of difficulty, not much more than faced by her
brother Fritz (1884-1941), who was also a mathematician. That third obstacle,
(^15) It will be recalled that Charlotte Angas Scott had given a new proof of a theorem by Max
Noether.