ABSTRACT
In 1913, on the eve of World War I , Emmy Noether again presented a paper at the DMV meeting, this time in Vienna, and once again she enjoyed exploring mathematics with her colleagues from throughout the German-speaking world. After the meeting she visited Franz Mertens , the Doktorvater of her friend and mentor Ernst Fischer , at his home in Vienna so they could discuss her research. Mertens, who knew of Noether’s collaboration with his former student Fischer , was a senior mathematician who had written a completely original and valid proof of Gordan ’s theorem of invariants . He, like Hilbert , had not attempted in his proof to provide a method for fi nding the invariants-he simply established that the invariants existed. Gordan would never have been satisfi ed until he found all of them. It turned out that Noether’s novel approach to algebra was much closer to Mertens’s work than to her Doktorvater Gordan’s.
