I think that it was also Emmy Noether who pointed out to Alexanderoff and Hof that the numerical invariants of spaces that topologists were lookig at were actually the invariants of the homology groups of the corresponding chain complexes

I believe this also, and had a paragraph about it in the original blogpost, which I deleted because I couldn’t figure out how to make it even marginally comprehensible to the non-mathematical reader (at least not without putting in more time than I had available). But this one observation, all by itself, was more productive than most entire careers, though it was, like the physics work, tangential to the main body of Noether’s work.

Great post!

I believe that you’ll find few have achieved so much because in that time at that time Emmy Noether was looked down upon by her male dominated profession.

In this regard she reminds me of Rosalind Franklin.

I believe it was in the John Derbyshire book ‘Unknown Quantity’ where Einstein himself approaches Noether to get him out of a mathematical “jam”.