The Reception of Noether’s First Theorem after 1950

Abstract

In the inventories that we shall present in this chapter and the next, we shall try to show how the two theorems of Noether that interest us here were discussed within the community of mathematicians and physicists in the books and articles that were published between 1950 and 1980.We tried to perform as wide a survey as possible in order to identify references to the Invariante Variationsprobleme in that literature that would support our impression that, in contrast to the period between 1921 and 1950, this article was indeed cited but not yet very frequently, and almost always in the truncated form in which Hill had presented it. We found that Noether’s name first appears in connection with differential invariants, the calculus of variations or the general theory of relativity in the books of Paul Funk [1962] and of Israel M. Gel’fand and Sergei V.