Poor Taste as a Bright Character Trait: Emmy Noether and the Independent Social Democratic Party

Abstract

ArgumentThe creation of algebraic topology required "all the energy and the temperament of Emmy Noether" according to topologists Paul Alexandroff and Heinz Hopf. Alexandroff stressed Noether's radical pro-Russian politics, which her colleagues found in "poor taste"; yet he found "a bright trait of character." She joined the Independent Social Democrats (USPD) in 1919. They were tiny in Göttingen until that year when their vote soared as they called for a dictatorship of the proletariat. The Minister of the Army and many Göttingen students called them Bolshevist terrorists. Noether's colleague Richard Courant criticized USPD radicalism. Her colleague Hermann Weyl downplayed her radicalism and that view remains influential but the evidence favors Alexandroff. Weyl was ambivalent in parallel ways about her mathematics and her politics. He deeply admired her yet he found her abstractness and her politics excessive and even dangerous.