4. Albert Einstein called German mathematician Emmy Noether a creative mathematical genius.

Noether’s Theorem is a fundamental idea on which much of modern physics is built. Published in 1918, her theorem states that if an object has symmetry — in other words, if it looks the same regardless of a difference in location or time — this leads to conservation laws in nature.

A simple example is a movie of the motion of a ball when you throw it. The motion looks the same if you run the movie backwards in time (time symmetry).