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Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)
- melling 6y agoThe BBC had an enjoyable podcast about famous mathematicians. Bourbaki was the last episode. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00srz5b/episodes/downloads https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00srz5b/episodes/downloads
- inetsee 6y agoI had read about "Bourbaki" in the past. I was not aware that the "Bourbaki" group was still active.
- gnulinux 6y agoIt's not the same set of members, there has been many generations of Bourbaki. They're pretty far from dead, they just published a textbook in 2016 on Algebraic Topology.
- toyg 6y agoThe name was recently referenced by a satellite of another pseudonymous group, Wu-Ming (previously "Luther Blissett"). Under the name "Nicoletta Bourbaki" * , they published a number of very detailed analysis of historic revisionism and disinformation efforts, focusing particularly on material peddled by right-wing activists from the Italian North-East border. Bunch of links, in Italian: Published on Wu-Ming's own blog: https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/tag/nicoletta-bourbaki/ https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/tag/nicoletta-bourbaki... Published on Internazionale magazine: https://www.internazionale.it/tag/autori/nicoletta-bourbaki https://www.internazionale.it/tag/autori/nicoletta-bourbaki Medium: https://medium.com/@nicolettabourbaki https://medium.com/@nicolettabourbaki * Nicoletta is the feminine form of Nicola, the Italian equivalent of Nicolas/Nicholas.
- lutherb 6y agoMore info on this kind of thing in the cultural field: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Blissett_(nom_de_plume) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Blissett_(nom_de_plume)
- ZenOfTheArt 6y agoI'm inclined to regard talk of judgement of who is a "great mathematician", who is the "greatest mathematician" and so on as mathematical criticism. And I'm inclined to regard mathematical critics in the same way G. H. Hardy did, as he explained in A Mathematician's Apology [1]. To put the matter more bluntly: if the pilots of Top Gun were in the business of criticism, there wouldn't be any left because they'd blow each other to bits. I think mathematicians and other high achievers should rather consider their relation to the Mary Sue and their domain of expertise as a LARP. Nobody likes a Mary Sue, nobody likes a Spock. And everyone should remember what rock music has to say about the fortunate sons who can aspire to the Mary Sue, Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival. [1] https://archive.org/details/AMathematiciansApology/page/n29 https://archive.org/details/AMathematiciansApology/page/n29
- derivativethrow 6y agoWhat does this comment mean?
- soVeryTired 6y agoIt reads like someone's playing around with a natural language generator.
- ZenOfTheArt 6y agoah you're just pessimistic about licking this marysueism mathematicians aren't a bunch of marysues, and you're never going to recruit carrying on that way you don't see the value in getting rid of it so mathematicians aren't burdened this way as if their burdens weren't great enough
- KKKKkkkk1 6y agoWhat motivates a research mathematician to publish their work under a collective pseudonym? I can't imagine that something like that is good for one's career.
- masklinn 6y agoFun, collective work and love of mathematics’ for mathematics’ sake? The group also got its start in the 1930s, the current “publish or perish” mindset was decades away. And new subfields were still getting discovered left and right so there was no lack of material anyway.
- davidivadavid 6y agoI don't think that anything published under Bourbaki's name is considered research work, though.
- kkylin 6y agoExactly. I think the goal was to formalize and codify mathematics. They didn't publish any original papers.
- QuesnayJr 6y agoThey published a couple of original papers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki#Articles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki#Articles I assume they were lacunae in the literature that came up while writing the books, but Wikipedia doesn't explain.
- klyrs 6y agoIt was done for the advancement of mathematics, not something so trifling as an individual's career. Explaining this makes me feel incredibly old.
- esperent 6y agoPeople, including mathematicians, have been career driven for a lot longer than we have been around.
- bitwize 6y ago...Except, perhaps, for Satoshi Nakamoto.
- throwthe1917 6y agoSatoshi isn't the greatest mathematician who never was. Satoshi is the greatest ancap who never was. It's either that, or he's Nick Szabo.
- reinkaos 6y agoI think it's much more likely Wei Dai is Satoshi.
- real_satoshi 6y agoWrong again
- esperent 6y agoThat sounds like something Wei Dai would say.
- esperent 6y agoAustralian New Car Assessment Program?
- kirubakaran 6y agoIn the early days of HN, there was a super prolific user nickb https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=nickb https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=nickb I always thought it was an homage to Nicolas Bourbaki by pg and his friends who were using that account as a sock puppet. It was disputed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21825207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21825207 I guess we'll never know.
- foobar_ 6y agoI wonder if there can be a public version of this by sharing passwords openly but in a twisted way. 1. Create an account. 2. To know the password, you visit a service that gives you the password. 3. The service changes the password immediately in 10 seconds before which you login. 4. You can now post stuff with the account but can't change the password allowing another user to chime in. Now the service basically needs to not allow another user to login in 10 seconds. If the website doesn't allow multiple users to login then there needs to be an etiquette of one user at a time, although you can kick off the user after a definite amount of time if the website allows logout from all sessions.
- hadcomplained 6y agoInstead of providing a temporary password, can't that service just give a user the session information that is sent to the server via cookies?
- foobar_ 6y agoWell that is clever. Well lets see if it works ... I created this user overlookedscrum with a weak enough password, but you don't know it so you can't reset it. This is the cookie ~ key: user value: overlookedscrum&DtTI0rbgf7YKKL0Xgy65I4cJFAi962sH I tried it with two different browsers. It seems I can login freely, but can you ? I'll say ping below.
- overlookedscrum 6y ago
- tantalor 6y agoSee also Blanche Descartes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanche_Descartes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanche_Descartes The pseudonym originated by combining the initials of the mathematicians' given names (Bill, Leonard, Arthur, and Cedric) to form BLAC. This was extended to BLAnChe. The surname Descartes was chosen as a play on the common phrase carte blanche.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- messe 6y agoI feel like Bourbaki set back teaching mathematics a great deal, by focusing too much on the abstraction rather than the concepts and intuition behind it. V.I. Arnol'd does a better job of elucidating on this idea than I ever could in his "On Teaching Mathematics": https://www.uni-muenster.de/Physik.TP/~munsteg/arnold.html https://www.uni-muenster.de/Physik.TP/~munsteg/arnold.html
- enriquto 6y agoIt is a necessary "pendulum". I doubt that if Bourbaki hadn't existed, then the likes of Arnold would have not produced their beautiful (and useful) advice on mathematical pedagogy.
- rramadass 6y agoNope; that's not an argument but a platitude.
- drdeca 6y agoThis comment seems to be self-describing. Edit: ok, that may be a stretch, but I thought it was amusing because my comment could also be interpreted as describing itself.
- ves 6y agoI liked your comment! To substantiate this comment, I’ll say that words describing themselves are known as autonyms. So you marked out an autonomous comment.
- JadeNB 6y agoTeaching mathematics is a huge and important part of the mathematical endeavour, but that's not all that there is to it, and I don't think that's what Bourbaki was trying to do [0]. No one should learn, at least not initially, from a Bourbaki book—a sentiment with which I expect even his, uhm, constituents would agree [0]—but I suspect most professional mathematicians find the Bourbaki œuvre useful as a reference, both for facts they know that aren't otherwise written down, and for facts that are on the borders of their expertise and require only a spot check to confirm or dispute. Certainly I use it that way. [0] EDIT: I am wrong about this historical fact, although I believe it doesn't change my point about modern usage. Wikipedia says: > While teaching at the University of Strasbourg, Henri Cartan complained to his colleague André Weil of the inadequacy of available course material, which prompted Weil to propose a meeting with others in Paris to collectively write a modern analysis textbook. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki).
- fabatka 6y agoI think this is like saying: the greatest scientist of all time is "et al", who mastered all disciplines (including mathematics). Edit (clarification): I mean, by conflating multiple people's work as one (by whatever criteria, in this case a common pseudonym), comparison becomes meaningless.
- eru 6y ago'et al' may be the most published author. But ibidem gets way more citations. > I mean, by conflating multiple people's work as one (by whatever criteria, in this case a common pseudonym), comparison becomes meaningless. Meaningless in a strict sense. But good enough as a hook for an article. Compare also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Maria_Mierscheid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Maria_Mierscheid
- svat 6y agoAre you, by any chance, reading the subtitle as “The greatest mathematician, who never lived” (i.e. Bourbaki was the greatest mathematician, and he never lived) rather than as (what's written) “The greatest mathematician who never lived” (i.e. among the mathematicians who never lived, Bourbaki was the greatest)? The latter is a common snowclone especially in headlines, like (from https://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+*+*+you+haven%27t+heard+of%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+*+*+you+haven%27t+hea...) “The Most Important Filmmaker You Haven't Heard Of”, “The Coolest Apps You Haven't Heard Of”, “Meet Vulfpeck, the best band you haven't heard of yet” — e.g. the last one doesn't mean that Vulfpeck is the best band, just that among bands you (probably) haven't heard of, it's (according to the author) the best.
- eutropia 6y agoThe group was a "Camerata"! There was a great talk at Rubyconf 2019 by Jessica Kerr about groups like this all over history who move their respective fields forward much faster than their contemporaries. She draws parallels to John Von Neumann's group, Van Gogh and friends, and more. She talks about how the groups work together for a time doing great things, and then, and perhaps more importantly, the members of the group go on to do amazing things on their own or even start "invisible colleges" of their own. Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oeigCANJVQ&list=PLE7tQUdRKcyZDE8nFrKaqkpd-XK4huygU&index=6&t=0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oeigCANJVQ&list=PLE7tQUdRKc... Slides: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zcgmrmz35jthvv3/Camerata-rubyconf.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/zcgmrmz35jthvv3/Camerata-rubyconf....
- imaginetop 6y agoFun fact about Nicolas Bourbaki in pop culture. A popular band, Twenty One Pilots, adopted the character of Nicolas Bourbaki in their concept album Trench. It's interesting since they commonly use the symbol Ø in their branding, which was introduced in mathematics by Nicolas Bourbaki to denote an empty set.
- jbrooksuk 6y agoI came for the TOP reference and I was not disappointed.
- data_ders 6y agoMy favorite contribution of the Bourbaki group is the dangerous bend symbol! Knuth even typeset it into TeX. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbaki_dangerous_bend_symbol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbaki_dangerous_bend_symbol