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Nicolas Bourbaki
- FabHK 3y agoBourbaki's textbooks are notoriously formal, rigorous, and plain difficult. This gave rise to a cute inside joke in the Sokal hoax [0], where physicist Alan Sokal aimed to demonstrate the lack of intellectual rigour in contemporary post-modern cultural studies and produced a nonsensical "paper" (Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity) [1] that was promptly published in Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. At any rate, in that article, there's a footnote (to the hilarious statement that "More recently, Lacan's topologie du sujet has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism.") that reads: > For a gentle introduction to set theory, see Bourbaki (1970). Any competent peer reviewer reading the paper carefully would have fallen of the chair laughing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [1] https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgre...
- eigenket 3y agoIts worth mentioning that the journal originally refused to publish the Sokal paper, and eventually put it in a special non-peer reviewed issue they were making called "Science Wars". The aim of the Science wars issue was to have as many different points of view represented as possible. I find it amusing, given the context of the discussion, that people often fail to point this out.
- nicolas_t 3y agoThanks! I never knew that aspect of the Sokal story. Not surprised it's not repeated since it makes the story less entrancing.
- pi-e-sigma 3y agoLame cop out. The article was a complete nonsense. It wasnt something like an unortodox view of things or passable article that missed some citations or whatnot. It would be like Nature publishing ramblings of some schizofrenic and when called out on it explaining that it wasnt peer reviewed
- Vecr 3y agoI don't know about "schizophrenic", but Nature has published various weird things in their sub-journals.
- pi-e-sigma 3y agoI'd like to see an example on the same level as the Sokal article. That is a completely made up gibberish that is full of difficult words to look complicated and sophisticated.
- cygx 3y agoIn 2014, Springer and IEEE had to retract 120 comp-sci papers that were gibberish generated with SCIgen. The problem persists as of May 2021[1], and given the advancements in LLMs, I wouldn't be surprised if things are getting worse... [1] https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.24495 https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.2449...
- pi-e-sigma 3y agoThe Sokal article wasn't retracted and the editors still claim that they didn't make any mistake allowing his nonsense to be published. Can you see the difference?
- cygx 3y agoShrugs. It's an issue, but not necessarily as extreme as some people make it sound, and not entirely limited to the social sciences (see e.g. the justification of the physicist who approved Igor Bogdanov's thesis back in the day: All these were ideas that could possibly make sense. It showed some originality and some familiarity with the jargon. That's all I ask.).
- pi-e-sigma 3y agoI agree, in the grand scheme of things it's really nothing. It doesn't really bother me that someone somewhere published some nonsense. It only irks me the persistent defense of these obviously wrong decisions. Just admit you fucked up and move on. If the publishers did just that it would long have been forgotten.
- hermitcrab 3y ago"lack of intellectual rigour in contemporary post-modern cultural studies" Is putting it rather kindly.
- Koshkin 3y agoIt’s formal in places and certainly rigorous, but I don’t find it difficult.
- arawde 3y agoOnly a bit related, but I recently learned that André Weil's sister Simone was a noted philosopher and fought in the Spanish Civil War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil
- timeforcomputer 3y agoAt a second-hand bookstore I bought a biography of Simone Weil and have overheard some conversations about her work, and it looks like her work is very popular. I said I was interested in the biography because of her brother Andre the famous number theorist, and they didn't know she had a brother. Different worlds combined :)
- da-bacon 3y ago"The Weil Conjectures" by Karen Olsson is an interesting read that connects Andre and Simone and the authors own experiences as a math major. I thought it did a good job capture the appeal of math, but it's definitely not about the conjectures or their proof.
- aunetx 3y agoI would say that in France, Simone Weil really is more known than André Weil! And I suggest anyone to read La Condition Ouvrière (I don't know the title in English), which is not only very instructive and moving, but also specially beautiful in my opinion.
- ykonstant 3y ago>her work is very popular She was a great thinker and writer; I highly recommend her works.
- yau8edq12i 3y agoNot to be confused with Simone Veil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Veil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Veil (who also had an eventful life, to say the least).
- adamtaylor_13 3y agoYou mean Nico and the Niners? All jesting aside, I still haven’t put together the reference to Nicolas Bourbaki in twentyone pilots’ “Nico and the Niners”. Just a clever history pun or something?
- tmabraham 3y agoNicolas Bourbaki is the name of a character in twenty one pilots' concept album "He'll always try to stop me, that Nicolas Bourbaki He's got no friends close, but those who know him most know He goes by Nico" It is indeed inspired by the actual pseudonym, not just a pun.
- stoolpigeon 3y agoThe Bourbaki dangerous bend symbol is also a part of the lore and symbology for the band. I think that the use of the name is a 'clue' to the meaning of the symbol. The recent new release is the first time I think they've stated this explicitly.
- simplyinfinity 3y agoGoogle twenty one pilots lore explained. There's few hours worth of videos on the topic :)
- kirubakaran 3y agoWe had our own for a while: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=nickb https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=nickb That user was extremely prolific and, at that time was believed to be a group of people blessed by pg.
- gommm 3y agoThat brings back memories... I always wondered where they disappeared to.
- defrost 3y agoaka Satoshi Nakamoto V1.0
- seanhunter 3y agoThey have an official twitter account apparently[1] which canonically is run by the daughter of Nicolas. [1] https://twitter.com/i/flow/login?redirect_after_login=%2Fbetty_bourbaki https://twitter.com/i/flow/login?redirect_after_login=%2Fbet...
- AceJohnny2 3y ago> which canonically is run by the daughter of Nicolas Is there a joke I'm missing?
- seanhunter 3y agoNicholas Bourbaki is not a person. The Bourbaki group are a collective who work together (at a glacial pace) and publish under the pseudonym "Nicholas Bourbaki" when everyone in the group agrees that the work is done. They have lots of "in jokes" not least of which is the name Nicolas Bourbaki itself. Another of these in jokes that Nicolas has a daughter called Betty. They apparently published a wedding notice for her at some point also.
- yau8edq12i 3y agoThey've moved to ma(th)stodon after the twitter clusterfuck: https://mathstodon.xyz/@nbourbaki https://mathstodon.xyz/@nbourbaki
- timeforcomputer 3y agoAs a counterpoint, my favourite mathematician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Arnold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Arnold
- yau8edq12i 3y agoHow is this a "counterpoint"?
- timeforcomputer 3y agoArnold is very influential especially in "Russian math" pedagogy/philosophy, which could be contrasted a bit with "French math" where Bourbaki was very influential. I think anyone interested enough to read the Bourbaki article might be interested in reading about him since his wikipedia page has a few references pointing to interesting discussions about Bourbaki's influence. I should have mentioned a little details in the original comment, sorry!
- zyklu5 3y agoNot to mention the kind of mathematician that the Fields medal is poorer for not having as an awardee
- timeforcomputer 3y agoAlso not to mention that he has written many great textbooks on top of his research work. I would recommend anyone in an intro or second mostly-methods-based DE course to read his Ordinary Differential Equations. He doesn't entirely avoid useful methods (as I recall) but the approach was extremely different to what I had seen before, but so natural (pointing at geometry and topology, immediately discussing vector fields and a nice notation for flows in the beginning chapter).
- seanhunter 3y agoAs I understand it, the Bourbaki school was basically obsessed with the idea of making maths rigorous to the point where their published work is extremely difficult to understand and you basically already have to know the subject to read the stuff. Other people, Arnold in particular, felt that it was important to learning to gain a more intuitive understanding even if that meant sacrificing some rigour along the way, and that once you got there you could go back and sort of fill in the blanks. That's why that wiki page says Arnold was an outspoken critic of the trend towards high levels of abstraction in mathematics during the middle of the last century. He had very strong opinions on how this approach—which was most popularly implemented by the Bourbaki school in France—initially had a negative impact on French mathematical education, and then later on that of other countries as well. So a pastiche of the Bourbaki type criticism of Arnold's works would be that they are elegant but skip over some of the foundational steps that are necessary to be fully rigourous and the equivalent critique of Bourbaki is that their stuff is dry, tedious and impossible to understand which just puts people off the subject entirely rather than teaching them.
- seanhunter 3y agoFor all that Bourbaki has been highly influential (and equally contentious) in maths, I don't actually know anyone who owns a copy of "Éléments". Is that just because I'm not French and it's actually huge among French mathematicians or perhaps because I'm just not "there" yet in my study of maths, having not got on to analysis in particular? Obviously some ex-members of the group (Grothendieck and Serge Lang in particular) have published books that are more widely read.
- Galanwe 3y agoI guess there is a trend to consider, in which algebra and statistics tend to be picked and studied more in the last decade compared to e.g. analysis. Thus why we don't see all that many people studying advanced analysis books. I would also argue that each country / culture teaches mathematics in a different way, which may not suit well with an outsider. From my experience US/UK tend to emphasize intuition first and rigor later, while French mainly focus on rigorous reasoning and proofs, leaving intuition as a by-product of experience that will be eventually picked up by the student on his own. That may discourage non-French students to further read such books.
- yau8edq12i 3y agoGiven that you're talking about your "study of maths", I presume that you're a student. Well, Bourbaki books aren't textbooks. They're reference books. They're great when you need a theorem and you know you can just pickup your copy of "Lie algebras" and find it exactly where you expect it to be. And you know the proof will be there, and you know the proof of every single lemma used will be there. But it's not a learning tool. Think more about a dictionary/encyclopedia than a school book. You wouldn't learn to speak English by reading an English dictionary.
- ykonstant 3y ago> Well, Bourbaki books aren't textbooks. They're reference books. The Bourbaki group has repeatedly emphasized that point and explained their goal and rationale with the Elements; and yet, people still blame them for all sorts of developments in post-graduate mathematics education. I find it rather unbecoming.
- toyg 3y agoA group of Italian intellectuals recently used a similar approach, first going by "Luther Blissett" (who was an actual footballer) in the '90s, then "Wu Ming" (Chinese for "anonymous", initially suggested to be a legendary general like Sun Tzu), and later "Nicoletta Bourbaki". The three different collectives share some but not all participants, and focus on slightly different topics - or rather a different degree of focus, with Blissett being the most generic and Bourbaki the most specific (concerning herself only with fighting historic revisionism of WW2 in Italy).
- histories 3y agoI wholeheartedly recommend Luther Blissett's first novel, "Q" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(novel)