Emmy Noether’s Wonderful Theorem , Dwight E. Neuenschwander Johns Hopkins U. Press, Baltimore, 2011. $75.00, $30.00 paper (243 pp.). ISBN 978-0-8018-9693-4, ISBN 978-0-8018-9694-1 paper
In his attractively titled book, Emmy Noether’s Wonderful Theorem, Dwight Neuenschwander writes that his intended reader may be “a senior undergraduate physics major or a physics graduate student” with whom he wishes to share his passion for “the elegance and wonder of the relationship between symmetries and conservation laws.” In a flowery preface, he asserts that “Noether’s theorem deserves to be more widely known among physics students.” The result of Neuenschwander’s attempt is a textbook that contains a large amount of valuable information but that disappoints in other regards. And it only partly succeeds in illustrating the “universal importance and unsurpassed elegance” of what is commonly known as Noether’s theorem (there were actually two theorems and their converses) contained in her 1918 article, “Invariant...
