GDMSeminar: Abstracts of the talks (2020/6)

The Noether theorems a century later
Tuesday, July 28, 2020, 15:00 GMT

Abstract:  For this mostly historical talk, I wish to present the contents of the now famous article of Emmy Noether, "Invariante Variationsprobleme", published in the Gőttingen Nachrichten in 1918, an article that is often cited but rarely cited faithfully. As background, I shall sketch the work of her predecessors and I shall stress the motivation for her only contribution to mathematical physics, namely the question of whether energy was conserved in the general theory of relativity which had been discussed by Einstein and Hilbert since 1915. How original, how modern, how influential were her results? I shall comment on the curious transmission and later recognition of the wide applicability of the Noether theorems.

In a separate file, I compiled some references. In particular, see my book "The Noether Theorems. Invariance and Conservation Laws in the Twentieth Century", Springer, 2011 and 2018.