Comments on: set theory, lie groups, and functors, oh my!

set theory, lie groups, and functors, oh my!

kaibutsu — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 14:42:19 -0800

In 1935, a group of French mathematicians came together and published under a single name, with the goal of overthrowing all that had come before: The Rise and Fall of N. Bourbaki.

By: Zurishaddai

Zurishaddai — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 16:03:41 -0800

Wiki article. I had more luck waiting for the google cache of kaibutsu's linked article to load than the original page.

By: gleuschk

gleuschk — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 16:17:27 -0800

I expected the article to be either over the top, either potboiler style ("Modern mathematics was killed! Dead! by those hardass frogs!") or encyclopedic, all-consuming, and dusty (like, some say, the Bourbaki books themselves). But that's an excellent essay. It matches exactly with what I've been told about the history, by people who worked with Dixmier, Godement, and Samuel. Nice link, kaibatsu. Also, I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that, when faced with the need to jettison its plan to encompass all of mathematics, Bourbaki acknowledged Commutative Algebra as one of the two subfields important enough to deserve its own book. Rawk!

By: homunculus

homunculus — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 16:31:19 -0800

I like Bourbaki!

By: rosswald

rosswald — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 20:45:12 -0800

This is the first trul interesting post I have read on MeFi in a awhile. Thanks

By: rosswald

rosswald — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 20:45:59 -0800

guess I should actually USE that preview feature....oh well

By: Zurishaddai

Zurishaddai — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 15:17:48 -0800

From the article: France was sending promising young students to the front... How true. There's no exaggerating the number of men destined for important intellectual careers who lost their lives in those senseless years of death. The equivalent (a literal majority of a country's top-rate university students dying within a few years) is hard for us to comprehend today. Another such crisis hit French sociology. Of Durkheim's most promising students, the expected continuers of his legacy, almost all of them (including his son) died in the war, excepting Mauss & some others. The master himself probably died of grief at seeing the fate of a whole intellectual movement and branch of an academic discipline determined by war. It's interesting to see what kind of creativity grew out of that in the Bourbaki case. In a "normal" academic setting, there are many factors that tend to stifle something as inspiring as a movement, cemented by personal bonds, to change the discipline. This thing happens rarely, and I don't really think it's because the necessary talents are rare, so much as because the structure of academia exists to serve very different ends. An interesting bunch, these Bourbaki guys. André Weil, one of the founders, was the brother of the famous philosopher Simone Weil. Serge Lang, now 77 years old, is a brilliant expositor (in his books) of quite difficult mathematical topics, but today his notoriety derives from his opposition to the HIV-AIDS connection.