More On The Joys Of The Introvert

Penny recommended this to me:

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From Einstein’s obituary in the NYT for Emmy Noether, a world-class mathematician who made signal progress in the algebra of rings and whose work was important to him in his own work.  She was a woman, and barred from university posts (at first even from universities) in her earlier years; and two years after finally getting a university post in her natuve Germany, she was stripped of it by the Nazis.  She emigrated to America and taught at Bryn Mawr, but died two years later after an embolism from an operation. 

“…there is, fortunately, a minority composed of those who reconize early in their lives that the most beautiful and satisfying experiences open to humankind are not derived from the outside, but are bound up with the development of the individual’s own feeling, thinking and acting.  The genuine artists, investigators and thinkers have always been persons of this kind.  However inconspicuously the life of these individuals runs its course, nonetheless the fruits of their endeavors are the most valuable contributions which one generation can make to its successors.”

Quoted in Unknown Quantity, a Real and Imaginary History of Algebra, by John Derbyshire (p. 240).

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