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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)

#21

Post by soVeryTired »

derivativethrow wrote: post #13
ZenOfTheArt wrote: post #6

I'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 e…

What does this comment mean?

It reads like someone's playing around with a natural language generator.

Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)

#22

Post by reinkaos »

throwthe1917 wrote: post #18
bitwize wrote: post #8

...Except, perhaps, for Satoshi Nakamoto.

Satoshi isn't the greatest mathematician who never was. Satoshi is the greatest ancap who never was. It's either that, or he's Nick Szabo.

I think it's much more likely Wei Dai is Satoshi.

Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)

#23

Post by davidivadavid »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #7

What 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.

I don't think that anything published under Bourbaki's name is considered research work, though.

Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)

#24

Post by ZenOfTheArt »

soVeryTired wrote: post #21
derivativethrow wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this comment mean?

It reads like someone's playing around with a natural language generator.

ah you're just pessimistic about licking this marysueism

mathematicians aren't a bunch of marysues, and you're never going to recruit carrying on that way

you don't see the value in getting rid of it so mathematicians aren't burdened this way

as if their burdens weren't great enough

Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)

#25

Post by imaginetop »

Fun fact about Nicolas Bourbaki in pop culture. A popular band, Twenty One Pilots, adopted the character of Nicolas Bourbaki in their concept album Trench. It's interesting since they commonly use the symbol Ø in their branding, which was introduced in mathematics by Nicolas Bourbaki to denote an empty set.

Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)

#26

Post by klyrs »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #7

What 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.

It was done for the advancement of mathematics, not something so trifling as an individual's career. Explaining this makes me feel incredibly old.

Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)

#27

Post by real_satoshi »

reinkaos wrote: post #22
throwthe1917 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi isn't the greatest mathematician who never was. Satoshi is the greatest ancap who never was. It's either that, or he's Nick Szabo.

I think it's much more likely Wei Dai is Satoshi.

Wrong again

Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)

#28

Post by rramadass »

messe wrote: post #12

I feel like Bourbaki set back teaching mathematics a great deal, by focusing too much on the abstraction rather than the concepts and intuition behind it. V.I. Arnol'd does a better job of elucidating on this idea than I ever could in his "On Teaching Mathematics": https://www.uni-muenster.de/Physik.TP/~munsteg/arnold.html

Exactly right! Great article!

People forget that generalization/abstraction is the end goal and should never be the first step. Unless and until you are sufficiently intellectually mature you should never start with general principles. Always start with a concrete example, motivate the arguments and slowly build/use the tools of Mathematics to work towards a solution. This is how Humans have learnt and developed for millennia but with the explosion of knowledge in the 19th/20th century we seem to have forgotten it and taken a completely wrong turn in the teaching of Mathematics. The result is that we have a lot of educated people (see in mirror :-) without any proper understanding.

Re: Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019)

#29

Post by rramadass »

enriquto wrote: post #15
messe wrote: post #12

I feel like Bourbaki set back teaching mathematics a great deal, by focusing too much on the abstraction rather than the concepts and intuition behind it. V.I. Arnol'd does a better job of elucidating on this idea than I ever could in his "On Teaching Mathematics": https://www.uni-muenster.de/Physik.TP/~munsteg/arnold.html

It is a necessary "pendulum". I doubt that if Bourbaki hadn't existed, then the likes of Arnold would have not produced their beautiful (and useful) advice on mathematical pedagogy.

Nope; that's not an argument but a platitude.
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