in the presence of a large group action, even non-noetherian rings sometimes behave like noetherian rings. for example, cohen proved that every symmetric ideal in the infinite variable polynomial ring is generated by finitely many polynomials (and their orbits under the infinite symmetric group). in this talk, i will give a brief introduction to equivariant commutative algebra where we systematically study such noetherian phenomena in infinite variable polynomial rings, and explain my work over fields of positive characteristic.