In 1915 Emmy Noether was invited by Klein and Hilbert to Göttingen to assist them in understanding the law of conservation of energy in Einstein’s new general theory of relativity. She succeeded brilliantly. In the Invariante Variationsprobleme, published in 1918, she proved a fundamental theorem linking invariance properties and conservation laws in any theory formulated in terms of a variational principle, and she stated a second theorem which put a conjecture of Hilbert in perspective and furnished a proof of a much more general result.
This book will be of interest to historians of science, to teachers of mathematics, mechanics and physics, and to mathematicians and mathematical physicists. Also by Yvette Kosmann-Schwarzbach: Groups and Symmetries: From Finite Groups to Lie Groups, © 2010 Springer, ISBN: 978-0-387-78865-4.
Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences
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Emmy Noether (1882–1935) (photograph courtesy of the Emmy Noether Foundation, Bar Ilan University)
Yvette Kosmann-Schwarzbach
The Noether Theorems Invariance and Conservation Laws in the Twentieth Century
Translated by Bertram E. Schwarzbach
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Yvette Kosmann-Schwarzbach Centre de Mathématiques Laurent Schwartz École Polytechnique 91128 Palaiseau France
[email protected]
Bertram E. Schwarzbach (Translator)
e-ISBN 978-0-387-87868-3 ISBN 978-0-387-87867-6 DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-87868-3 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Mathematics Subject Classification (2010): 01-02, 22-03, 22E70, 49-03, 49S05, 70-03, 70H03, 70H33, 83-03
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In memory of Yseult d′′ r who liked science as well as history
Preface
What follows thus depends upon a combination of the methods of the formal calculus of variations and of Lie's theory of groups. Emmy Noether, 1918