### Tony Phillips' Take Blog on Math Blogs

 Mail to a friend · Print this article · Previous Columns Tony Phillips' Take on Math in the Media A monthly survey of math news

# This month's topics:

## Emmy Noether in The New York Times

Back on March 26, 2012, the New York Times ran an article about Emmy Noether on the front page of their Science section. "The Mighty Mathematician You've Never Heard Of", by Natalie Angier, focuses on the "20th-century mathematical genius Amalie Noether" and on "the depths of her perverse and unmerited obscurity." Angier concentrates on Noether's Theorem, which "united with magisterial concision two conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation," and which "undergirds much of today's vanguard research in physics, including the hunt for the almighty Higgs boson." After recounting Noether's background and early career, Angier returns to Noether's Theorem, with the nice example of a bicycle wheel: "If a bicycle wheel is radially symmetric, if you can spin it on its axis and it still looks the same in all directions, well, then, that symmetric translation must yield a corresponding conservation. By applying the principles and calculations embodied in Noether's theorem, you'll see that it is angular momentum, the Newtonian impulse that keeps bicyclists upright and on the move." Angier also records the "most profound" consequence of the theorem: "a symmetry of time--like the fact that whether you throw a ball in the air tomorrow or make the same toss next week will have no effect on the ball's trajectory--is directly related to the conservation of energy." Angier is very brief on Noether's mathematics: she published "groundbreaking papers, sometimes under a man's name, in rarefied fields of abstract algebra and ring theory." [ From Al-Khwarizmi to Emmy Noether is the subtitle of B. L. Van der Waerden's A History of Algebra. And Noether was in at the birth of modern, functorial algebraic topology: she recognized that the objects to be studied were not just Betti numbers and torsion coefficients but homology groups. -TP]

## The Museum of Mathematics in Nature

A rendering of the upper level of the Museum of Mathematics, due to open in New York City on Saturday, December 15, 2012.

Nature's Jascha Hoffman interviewed Glen Whitney for a "Q&A" piece in the September 6, 2012 issue. "Mathematician Glen Whitney left a job in finance to set up the Museum of Mathematics (MoMath), which is due to open in Manhattan, New York, on 15 December. He wants to spread the word that mathematics is a beautiful discipline and all around us, from the geometry of soap bubbles to the algorithms that control traffic lights." We learn that Glen went to Harvard, taught at Michigan and worked with Jim Simons at Renaissance Technologies. "It was exciting and intellectually demanding, but I wanted to do something beneficial to society at large." Hoffman asks why Glen is focussed on the public image of mathematics. "I believe this attitude ['I was always terrible at maths'] stems primarily from the emphasis on rote procedures and people paying too little attention to making connections with everyday life and the world around them. We need a cultural institution to combat this prejudice." What will a visitor find at your museum? "Hands-on exhibits showing how mathematics can be tangible, open-ended and fun. In the new museum, we will have exhibits on everything from the beautiful patterns created by video feedback to the probabilities of making a free throw in basketball." "There is maths everywhere."

Tony Phillips
Stony Brook University
tony at math.sunysb.edu