100 4. WOMEN MATHEMATICIANSat the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.^17 Despite the gathering clouds
in Germany, she returned there in 1934 to visit her brother Fritz, who was about
to seek asylum in the Soviet Union. (Ironically, he was arrested in 1937, during
one of the many purges conducted by Stalin, and executed as a German spy on the
day the Germans occupied Smolensk in 1941.) She returned to Bryn Mawr in the
spring of 1934.
Weyl, who went to Princeton in 1933, expressed his indignation at the Nazi
policy of excluding "non-Aryans" from teaching. In a letter sent to Heinrich Brandt
(1886-1954) in Halle he wrote:^18
What impresses me most about Emmy Noether is that her research
has become more and more concrete and profound. Why should
this Jewess not work in the area that has led to such great achieve-
ments in the hands of the "Aryan" Dedekind? I am happy to leave
it to Herrn Spengler and Bieberbach to assign mathematical modes
of thought according to cultures and races. [Jentsch, 1986, p. 9]
At Bryn Mawr she was a great success and an inspiration to the women studying
there. She taught several graduate and postdoctoral students who went on to
successful careers, including her former assistant from Gottingen, Olga Taussky
(1906-1995), who was forced to leave a tutoring position in Vienna in 1933. Her
time, however, was to be very brief. She developed a tumor in 1935, but she does
not seem to have been worried about its possible consequences. It was therefore a
great shock to her colleagues in April 1935 when, after an operation at Bryn Mawr
Hospital that seemed to offer a good prognosis, she developed complications and
died within a few hours.
4. American women
In the United States higher education was open to women from the late nineteenth
century on in the large, well-supported state universities. The elite eastern univer-
sities later known as the Ivy League remained mostly all-male for another century;
but some of them were near women's colleges, and some of the women from those
colleges were able to take courses at places like Harvard and the University of Penn-
sylvania. Although mathematics in general in the United States was not yet on a
par with what was being done in Europe, American women began to participate
in the profession in the late nineteenth century. Our summary of this story is very
incomplete, and the reader is referred to the excellent article of Green and LaDuke
(1987) for complete statistics on the women mathematicians and the institutions
where they studied and worked.
(^17) There was no chance of her lecturing at Princeton University itself, which was all-male at the
time.
(^18) Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) was a German philosopher of history, best known for having
written Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West). His philosophy of history,
which Weyl alludes to in this quote, suited the Nazis. Although at first sympathetic to them,
he was repelled by their crudity and their antisemitism. By the time Weyl wrote this letter, the
Nazis had banned all mention of Spengler on German radio. Ludwig Bieberbach (1886-1982) was
a mathematician of some talent who worked at Berlin during the Nazi era and edited the Party-
approved journal Deutsche Mathematik. At the time when Weyl wrote this letter, Bieberbach
was wearing a Nazi uniform to the university and enthusiastically endorsing the persecution of
non-Aryans.