About Us

Project Noether (pronounced NO-Thur) is a teen-led initiative aimed at encouraging girls in math.

We started Project Noether to inspire girls from elementary and middle school in Dublin, California, especially those from underprivileged backgrounds, to learn math and realize their full potential through math competitions with fun problems. 

Girls lag behind boys in several STEM areas, and the gap widens as they advance to higher levels of math. In the IMO, the highest level of competition math, the U.S. team has averaged just 0.2 girls per team. We want to encourage girls to be interested in math at a young age because girls are just as capable as boys at doing well in math and we want to try to reduce this gender gap. 

One of the big obstacles girls face is societal beliefs that they are worse at math than boys. According to a study from the University of Washington, despite no noticeable gender differences at this age in student performance in math, kids as young as second and third grade believe that boys are better at math. By creating a competition for girls, we hope to rectify that mentality.

 Our project is named after Emmy Noether, one of the most important female mathematicians to ever live, and also one who faced many difficulties. After completing her doctorate in mathematics, Noether could only work for the math department of a university without a salary. After working there for seven years, she was invited by renowned mathematician David Hilbert to teach at the University of Gottingen, a world-famous math research institute. However, the university’s philosophy department objected and she had to teach under Hilbert’s name for four years. Even after being expelled from her position due to the Nazi government, she continued to teach students in her home and later started teaching at Princeton.

Despite the difficulties she faced, Emmy Noether was very prolific - her work is often grouped into three separate areas, and Einstein called her the most important female mathematician ever. Her biggest contributions are to the fields of abstract algebra and mathematical physics. Her most famous contribution is called Noether’s theorem, which states that symmetries can be mapped onto the conservation laws of physics. This is the basis of Einstein’s general relativity theorem, and is also one of the fundamental tools of modern theoretical physics.