NOETHER

GERMANY (see also List of Individuals)

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7.10.1884 Erlangen/D - 10.9.1941 Orel/RU

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Fritz Noether made studies in mathematics and physics at the Universities of Erlangen and Munich, and there also submitted a PhD thesis in 1909. He continued research in gyroscopes and collaborated with Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951). Noether submitted a habilitation thesis in 1911 to Karlsruhe University on the resistance law of Stokes and was there appointed associate professor in 1918. He moved in 1922 as a professor of mathematics to the University of Breslau, today's Wrocł aw in Poland. There he was retired due to the Nazi race laws in 1934. In contrast to his sister Emmy, a famous mathematician, Noether went to the USSR where he was appointed professor of mathematics and mechanics at the Siberian University of Tomsk. During the Stalinist purge he was arrested, accused of espionage for Germany and sentenced to 25 years of jail. Following the opening of the Russian archives in the late 1980's, it became evident that Noether was shot due to anti-Soviet propaganda.

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Noether's main contribution to science was his criticism towards some of Heisenberg's results which were evidenced only decades later. He has also published some works on the turbulence problems thereby accounting for a mathematical approach. His particular interest was the origin of turbulent flow, as was experimentally investigated by colleagues such as Ludwig Schiller (1882-1961). He also investigated the definition domains of the resistance formulas relating to the fall of spheres in a viscous fluid, as first investigated by George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903). In 1931 Noether presented a chapter on the integration of the Navier-Stokes equations.

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_{Anonymous (1999). Noether, Fritz Alexander Ernst. Neue Deutsche Biographie 19: 321-322.}

_{Duncker&Humblot: Berlin.}

_{Noether, F. (1913). Gültigkeitsbereich der Stokesschen Widerstandsformel. Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik 62: 1-39.}

_{Noether, F. (1917). Zur Theorie der Turbulenz. Nachrichten Königliche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften Göttingen, Math.-Phys. Klasse: 199-212.}

_{Noether, F. (1921). Das Turbulenzproblem. ZAMM 1: 123-138; 1: 218-219.}

_{Noether, F. (1931). Integrationsprobleme der Navier-Stokes'schen Differentialgleichungen. Handbuch der physikalischen und technischen Mechanik 5(3): 719-796. Barth: Leipzig. Noether, G. (1985). Fritz Noether. Integral equations and operator theory 8: 573-579. P Poggendorff, J.C. (1925). Noether, Fritz. Biographisch-Literarisches Handwörterbuch 5: 910; 6: 1870; 7a: 439; 8: 1968. Verlag Chemie: Berlin, with bibliography.}