It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the Emmy Noether Lecture, one of the highlights of the 2026 Annual Meeting of the German Mathematical Society (DMV).

Each year, one of the invited plenary speakers is selected to deliver the Emmy Noether Lecture, recognizing outstanding women mathematicians and their scientific contributions. In 2026, Plenary Lecture 6 by Britta Späth has been designated as the Emmy Noether Lecture.

Date & Time: Wednesday, 09/Sept/2026: 10:45am - 11:45am
Location: A 600

Speaker: Britta Späth (University of Wuppertal)

Title: Global vs local in the representation theory of finite groups: conjectures and theorems

View Plenary Lecture 6 in the Online Program  

Britta Späth is Professor of Algebra and Number Theory at the University of Wuppertal and a leading expert in the representation theory of finite groups. Together with Marc Cabanes, she recently completed the proof of the McKay conjecture, resolving a major problem in the representation theory of finite groups.

Abstract

Local analysis in finite group theory consists, for a given group G and a prime number p, in dealing with information about p-subgroups of G and their normalizers. This was one of the main threads in the classification of finite simple groups (1955–1985), first with the prime 2 after the Odd Order Theorem, then with other primes.

In the representation theory of finite groups, Brauer’s theory of defect subgroups for blocks in characteristic p makes heavy use of the p-local structure of the groups involved. The conjectures by McKay (1971), Alperin (1986), Broué (1990), and Dade (1992) are all formulated in that language.

McKay’s conjecture was proved recently (Cabanes–Späth, 2013–2026) using the reduction to a problem about simple groups (Isaacs–Malle–Navarro, 2007). It is now a theorem asserting that a finite group has as many irreducible complex characters of degree prime to p as the normalizer of a Sylow p-subgroup does.

About the Emmy Noether Lecture

Since 2008, the Emmy Noether Lecture has been a special part of the DMV Annual Meeting. The lecture recognizes outstanding women mathematicians for their scientific contributions and brings their research to a broad mathematical audience.

It is named after Emmy Noether (1882–1935), widely regarded as one of the most important mathematicians of the twentieth century. Despite facing severe structural barriers as a woman in academia, working for years without pay or an official position, she revolutionized abstract algebra through her groundbreaking work on rings, fields, and ideals. Invited to Göttingen by David Hilbert and Felix Klein, she became the intellectual heart of a world leading research group. In physics, her famous Noether’s Theorem fundamentally connected symmetries with conservation laws, becoming a foundational pillar of modern theoretical physics.

The Emmy Noether Lecture celebrates this extraordinary legacy by highlighting outstanding contemporary research and strengthening the visibility of women in mathematics.

The 2026 Emmy Noether Lecture is generously supported by Konstanz Women in Mathematics (KWIM), with support for the speaker’s travel and accommodation.