Emmy Noether’s contribution to the wonderful world of technology comes in the form of mathematics. She proved that “For every continuous symmetry than an environment has, there is a corresponding conserved quantity” (Brian 2011). Simply put it means that energy is conserved if every part of a system is moving together. For example, a ball is thrown straight up into the air at 10 f/s. How high did the ball go (Brian 2011)? This isn’t an uncommon form of question for physics and this example can be simply solved with Newton’s laws and his theories on gravity as shown: 
. To solve this problem all that needs to be done is for the variables to go in the right places as such: 
With that we find that that the ball went up about 1.5 feet. This equation works well for simple problems. What happens when there is more than one force acting on the object however? Magnetic force and wind can frequently affect the trajectory of an object and to account for all those forces using Newton’s laws becomes very complicated very quickly. This is where Emmy Noether’s theory shows itself to be superior.
The problem above can be solved using Emmy Noether’s theorem just as simply, but instead takes a more intuitive route. Since the initial force is given, the conservation of energy says that the total about of energy is the same at all points of the balls flight including kinetic and potential. At the beginning of the balls journey, it has all kinetic energy and at the highest point of its course it has all potential energy (Browne 2011). This can be expressed in the following equation: 
While this equation looks more intimidating, what it means is that momentum is equal to the rate of change of the kinetic energy divided by the rate of change for the position of the ball and that momentum is constant. This formula simply gets reworked to solve for s. If more than just gravity effects the ball then it is accounted for as part of the kinetic energy and can be more easily solved than with previous methods.
The most basic way to explain her theorem is that you don’t lose energy, and that rather than applying the laws of physics (like gravity) to a situation, which can be very hard to math properly, you can just count up all the energy at the beginning, and then find places for all the energy at the ending.
Her theorem is used today mostly in quantum physics. Before Noether we knew nothing about sub-atomic fields or their movements. It even went so far as to predict the Higgs Boson (Straub 2005). The new physics involved at sub-atomic levels brought about by the understanding found from Noether includes radiation treatments for cancer. The discovery of the Higgs Boson opens up an insurmountable number of possibilities with possible applications being theorized like anti-gravity.
As a woman kept out of higher learning and nearly forgotten by history her impact will only become more prevalent as we advance our own technology.
