This year marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of a groundbreaking paper in the area of mathematics known as ring theory by a German Jew named Emmy Noether—whom Albert Einstein would later describe as a “creative mathematical genius.” When Noether completed her doctorate in 1909, at the age of twenty-seven, women were barred from the faculties of German universities. She only obtained a position as a lecturer in 1919. Tamar Lichter Blanks tells her story:

Noether made important contributions to theoretical physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity. . . . Noetherian rings, [a category of mathematical phenomena she discovered], show up all the time in modern mathematics. Mathematicians still use Noether’s [methods] today, not just in ring theory, but in other areas such as number theory and algebraic geometry.

Noether published her famous ring-theory paper and other important results in mathematics while she was a lecturer in Göttingen from 1919 to 1933. But in the spring of 1933, the University of Göttingen received a telegram: six faculty members—including Noether—had to stop teaching immediately. The Nazis had passed a law barring Jews from professorship.

Noether’s response, it seems, was calm. “This thing is much less terrible for me than it is for many others,” she wrote in a letter to a fellow mathematician. But she was out of a job, and no university in Germany could hire her.

Help came from the United States. Bryn Mawr, a women’s college in Pennsylvania, offered Noether a professorship through a special fund for refugee German scholars. . . . Noether’s time at Bryn Mawr was, tragically, short. In 1935 she had surgery to remove a tumor and died unexpectedly four days later.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.