noether returned to erlangen. she officially reentered the university in october 1904, and declared her intention to focus solely on mathematics. under the supervision of paul gordan she wrote her dissertation, "über die bildung des formensystems der ternären biquadratischen form" ("on complete systems of invariants for ternary biquadratic forms", 1907). gordan was a member of the "computational" school of invariant researchers, and noether's thesis ended with a list of over 300 explicitly worked out invariants. this approach to invariants was later superseded by the more abstract and general approach pioneered by hilbert. although it had been well received, noether later described her thesis and a number of subsequent similar papers she produced as "crap".