Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)
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Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)
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Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)
#2The BBC had an enjoyable podcast about famous mathematicians.
Bourbaki was the last episode.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00srz5b/episodes/downloads
Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)
#3I had read about "Bourbaki" in the past. I was not aware that the "Bourbaki" group was still active.
Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)
#4I had read about "Bourbaki" in the past. I was not aware that the "Bourbaki" group was still active.
It'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.
Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)
#5The 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...
Published on Internazionale magazine: https://www.internazionale.it/tag/autori/nicoletta-bourbaki
Medium: https://medium.com/@nicolettabourbaki
* Nicoletta is the feminine form of Nicola, the Italian equivalent of Nicolas/Nicholas.
Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)
#6I'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
Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)
#7What 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.
Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)
#8...Except, perhaps, for Satoshi Nakamoto.
Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)
#9In the early days of HN, there was a super prolific user 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 I guess we'll never know.
Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)
#10What 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.
Fun, 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.