Emmy Noether was the greatest female mathematician of the 20th century, and quite possibly of all time. She was the daughter of a mathematician, too, so there is plenty of scope for nature-nurture speculation here. Emmy's father, Max Noether, was a professor of mathematics in the southern German town of Erlangen, just north of Nuremberg. Emmy was born there in 1882. Her career has to be seen in the context of the German empire in which she grew up, the empire of Bismarck (prime minister and chancellor to 1890) and Wilhelm II (German emperor — "Kaiser" — from 1888 to 1918). Of the place of women in that society, the historian Gordon Craig has this to say: