Noether

By the mid 1920s, Emmy Noether had made fundamental contributions to commutative algebra and to the theory of invariants. Her crowning achievement from this period was "Noether's Theorem," establishing deep connections between conserved quantities...

A single result of Noether's is widely credited in physics papers as fundamental to the modern way of approaching physics. Two basic ideas are those of symmetry on the one side and the notion of quantities such as energy preserved under flows on the...