section_path: University of Göttingen/Influential lectures
section_name: Influential lectures
paragraph_text: Influential lectures
  
  Noether's frugal lifestyle at first was due to her being denied pay for her work. However, even after the university began paying her a small salary in 1923, she continued to live a simple and modest life. She was paid more generously later in her life, but saved half of her salary to bequeath to her nephew, Gottfried E. Noether.
  
  Biographers suggest that she was mostly unconcerned about appearance and manners, focusing on her studies. Olga Taussky-Todd, a distinguished algebraist taught by Noether, described a luncheon during which Noether, wholly engrossed in a discussion of mathematics, "gesticulated wildly" as she ate and "spilled her food constantly and wiped it off from her dress, completely unperturbed". Appearance-conscious students cringed as she retrieved the handkerchief from her blouse and ignored the increasing disarray of her hair during a lecture. Two female students once approached her during a break in a two-hour class to express their concern, but they were unable to break through the energetic mathematical discussion she was having with other students.
  
  Noether did not follow a lesson plan for her lectures. She spoke quickly and her lectures were considered difficult to follow by many, including Carl Ludwig Siegel and Paul Dubreil. Students who disliked her style often felt alienated. "Outsiders" who occasionally visited Noether's lectures usually spent only half an hour in the room before leaving in frustration or confusion. A regular student said of one such instance: "The enemy has been defeated; he has cleared out."
  
  She used her lectures as a spontaneous discussion time with her students, to think through and clarify important problems in mathematics. Some of her most important results were developed in these lectures, and the lecture notes of her students formed the basis for several important textbooks, such as those of van der Waerden and Deuring. Noether transmitted an infectious mathematical enthusiasm to her most dedicated students, who relished their lively conversations with her.
  
  Several of her colleagues attended her lectures and she sometimes allowed others (including her students) to receive credit for her ideas, resulting in much of her work appearing in papers not under her name. Noether was recorded as having given at least five semester-long courses at Göttingen:
  
  These courses often preceded major publications on the same subjects.