On the last paper of Theodor Molien

Theodor Molien , a XIX-XX century mathematician who worked in Tartu and in Tomsk, is considered nowadays as one of the pioneers of the modern theory of associative algebras and representation theory of groups. A lot about him was written in Estonia, Russia, and elsewhere. However, his last paper, published in 1935 in an obscure Russian periodical, has been apparently escaped the attention of researchers. This paper is interesting in at least two respects. First, in that paper Molien is touching upon the topics from his nowadays famous Dorpat (Tartu) disseration about the structure theory of associative algebras, but in a somewhat strange (and not always correct) way, and I will speculate on the possible reasons of this. Second, it contains one of the first, if not the first in the world literature, explicit attempts to build a theory of algebras given by generators and relations.