Bourbaki. A Secret Society of Mathematicians
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Author(s): M. Mashaal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0821839675
Format: softback
168pp
Price: £18.50
Review Date: 16 September 2006
Review: Actually Nicolas Bourbaki is not an individual but a group of mostly French mathematicians which was formed in 1935 and amounted to a dozen in all with such luminaries as Andr? Weil. They were to change the face of mathematics in the 1960s and 1970s. Their contribution to the field, primarily through their treatise ?l?ments de math?matique, was a new vision of mathematics, providing a profound reorganization and clarification of its components, lucid terminology and notation. At the same they neither invented revolutionary techniques nor proved great theorems, not did they try to. They built an extensive folklore around themselves over their secrecy, name, humour and school-boy pranks. Table of contents: 1 Group forms, 2 The story of a name, 3 Young Turks against stubborn priests, 4 Bourbaki’s ?lements de Math?matique, 5 Towards axioms and structures, 6 A snapshot of Bourbaki’s work: filters, 7 The Bourbaki seminar, 8 Subtle and austere schoolboys, 9 “For the honor of the human spirit”? 10 New math in the classroom, 11 An immortal mathematician?