International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) 2026

Step into history with a special visit to Bryn Mawr College, where Karen Parshall will give a talk about groundbreaking mathematician, Emmy Noether and how she spent the final chapter of her remarkable life.

In 1933, the German algebraist Emmy Noether (1882-1935) joined the Department of Mathematics at Bryn Mawr College. Renowned as one of the guiding lights behind what became known as modern algebra, Noether had overcome many obstacles. As a woman, she was able to earn a doctoral degree in Germany only after a law was passed 1908.Then, as a woman, she was denied the right to apply for the credential that would have allowed her to teach in 1915.Only thanks to the intervention of two heavyhitters--- Felix Klein and David Hilbert-did she finally succeed in getting a paid teaching job in 1923. Ten years later, however, the Nazis revoked the right to teach for all Jews. Friends in the United States secured her the position at Bryn Mawr that she held for less than two years, owing to her untimely death.

Karen Hunger Parshall is Commonwealth Professor Emerita of History and Mathematics at the University of Virginia. A historian of science, she has focused particularly on the history of algebra in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as on the history of mathematics in the United States. Her research was supported in 1996–1997 by both the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Science Foundation's Program for Visiting Professorships for Women and has been recognized by her election (in 2002) as a Corresponding Member of the Académie internationale d'histoire des sciences, (in 2012) as an Inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, (in 2018) as the winner of the Albert Leon Whiteman Prize of the American Mathematical Society, an international prize awarded once every three years that honors “notable exposition and exceptional scholarship in the history of mathematics,” and (in 2020) as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Section A).