Fritz Noether

Biography Fritz Noether's father Max Noether was professor of mathematics at the University of Erlangen. Starting in 1904, Fritz studied mathematics at the University of Erlangen and then at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he obtained his doctorate in 1909 with a dissertation about rolling movements of a sphere on surfaces of rotation, written under the direction of Aurel Voss. He obtained his habilitation in 1911 at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe.

He married in 1911 and had two children:

Noether served in World War I, was wounded, and received the Iron Cross. From 1922 to 1933 he was professor of mathematics at the Technische Universität Breslau (now Wrocław University of Science and Technology).

Not allowed to work in Nazi Germany for being a Jew, he emigrated in 1934 to the Soviet Union, while his sister Emmy immigrated to the United States. On 23 October 1938, Noether was sentenced to 25 years of imprisonment on charges of espionage and sabotage. He served time in various prisons.

As was revealed much later,

Contributions In 1909, Fritz Noether studied the concept of rigid bodies in special relativity proposed by Max Born. This resulted in the Herglotz–Noether theorem.

In 1921, he introduced the operators now known as Fredholm operators and the concept of the index of such an operator, giving an example of an operator whose kernel and cokernel have different finite dimension and providing a formula for the difference of these dimensions using a complex contour integral.

In 1923, Fritz Noether presented a critique of Werner Heisenberg's dissertation. Heisenberg had analyzed the transition from laminar to turbulent flow in fluids, and Noether claimed that the applied methods were not rigorous.