"It is queer that a formalist like Gordan was the mathematician from whom her mathematical orbit set out; a greater contrast is hardly imaginable than between her first paper, the dissertation, and her works of maturity; for the former is an extreme example of formal computations and the latter constitute an extreme and grandiose example of conceptual axiomatic thinking in mathematics that abhorred all calculation and operated in a much thinner air of abstraction than Hilbert, the young lion, ever dared."