Separating invariants

This paper studies separating subsets of an invariant ring or. more generally, of any set consisting of functions. We prove that a subset of a finitely generated algebra always contains a finite separating subset. We also show that a general version of Noether's degree bound holds for separating invariants, independently of the characteristic. While the general finiteness result is non-constructive, the Noether bound provides an easy algorithm for computing separating invariants of finite groups. The paper also contains a conceptual investigation of the difference between separating and generating subsets. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.