Stanislaw Ulam, and some writing on his behalf, have claimed that related ideas were current in the late 1930s in Poland. Eilenberg was Polish, and studied mathematics in Poland in the 1930s. Category theory is also, in some sense, a continuation of the work of Emmy Noether (one of Mac Lane's teachers) in formalizing abstract processes; Noether realized that in order to understand a type of mathematical structure, one needs to understand the processes preserving that structure. In order to achieve this understanding, Eilenberg and Mac Lane proposed an axiomatic formalization of the relation between structures and the processes preserving them.