The Bourbaki School of Mathematics
Overview
Nicolas Bourbaki is the pen name of a group of mathematicians, most of them French, who have undertaken the writing of a definitive treatise of modern mathematics. The Bourbaki volumes emphasize the highest degree of mathematical rigor and the structures common to different areas of mathematics. The group perpetuates itself by continually electing new members and requiring that current members must leave the group at age 50.
Background
Nicolas Bourbaki is the invention of two French mathematicians, Claude Chevalley (1909-1984) and André Weil (1906-1998), who decided to write a more modern calculus text for French-speaking students than the ones that were typically used. The choice of the Bourbaki name may have had its origin in a student prank. At some time in the 1930s, students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris were invited to a lecture by a famous mathematician named Nicholas Bourbaki. The lecturer was really a student in disguise, and the lecture given was pure double-talk. There was, however, an important Bourbaki in French history, General Charles Denis Sauter Bourbaki, a French military officer of Greek descent who experienced a decisive defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. It may be that the choice of name honors the Greek roots of mathematics, but it may also simply reflect the memory of an unusual name, memorialized in a statue of General Bourbaki at Nancy, France, where some of the Bourbaki group had taught.
This page contains 201 words.
The Bourbaki School of Mathematics article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 1,510 words
(approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Nicolas Bourbaki Article
