Gottfried E. Noether


Gottfried Emanuel Noether was a German-born American statistician and educator; one of the third generation of a famous family of mathematicians: he was the son of Fritz Noether and nephew of Emmy Noether, the grandson of Max Noether, and brother of chemist Herman Noether. He died in Willimantic, Connecticut.

Education and career

Noether was born into a Jewish family in Karlsruhe, Grand Duchy of Baden, German Empire in 1915. He later moved to Breslau. The Nazi regime annulled his citizenship. He immigrated to the United States in 1939, where he earned a bachelor's degree and a master's degree.
The following four years, during World War II, he served with US Army intelligence in England, France, and Germany. Noether was one of the Ritchie Boys. After the war, he earned a doctorate from Columbia University.
He worked in academia for the rest of his career, beginning at New York University. He moved to Boston University in 1952 where he worked until he joined the faculty of the University of Connecticut in 1968. There, he eventually became chairman of the department of statistics. He retired in 1985.

Statistician

Noether served on a statistical advisory committee for the United States Office of Management and Budget and as an associate editor of The American Statistician. He was a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
As an expert on non-parametric statistics, he wrote over 50 articles and six books. He also wrote a brief biography of his father Fritz, who was executed in the Soviet Union in 1941.

Honours

In 1999, the Gottfried E. Noether Awards were established to "recognize distinguished researchers and teachers and to support research in the field of nonparametric statistics." The initial recipients of the Gottfried E. Noether Senior Scholar Awards were Erich Leo Lehmann and Robert V. Hogg, and Pranab K. Sen.