This blog is part of the History of Mathematics course at Saint Xavier University.
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Thursday, August 12, 2010
The Mathematician who didn't really exist!
Here you can listen to author and scholar Amir Aczel who talks about Nicolas Bourbaki, the genius mathematician who didn't exist! Listen to Amir Aczel at NPR...
Who ever thinks that math isn’t fun has clearly not heard the story of Nicholas Bourbaki. (A.K.A the longest running joke in mathematics). As I was listening to the pod cast it was interesting to note all of the mathematical advancements that were made by someone who did not exist. So how did this person come into being? Well, it all began with 6 (7 depending on whose telling the story) mathematicians who wanted to write a better book than Gorsaph. Gorsaph, who was the one who had the established calculus book of that time, had written a poor book and was blamed with failing French mathematics. So, the group took it upon themselves to write a better one. However, they did not know if a “committee’ of people could write a book, consequently they decided on a name to represent the entire group: Nicholas Bourbaki. The group of mathematicians began with set theory and decided that that would be their foundation. The idea behind this was that they hoped people would see that a new math could be taught if they used set theory for their building block. It was because of them that rigor was introduced into math and not only did they add generalization to proofs, they put focus on the abstract as well. The reason we have well written proofs began with the efforts of Nicolas Bourbaki. Seeing an email sent out by Dr Mojiri on mathematics being on Facebook, I decided to see if anything came up on Bourbaki. And what I found was a link to “his” profile as well as a Wikipedia page that contained the works completed by the group. Some of them are Set Theory, Algebra, Topology, and Integration. One of the other things that I found was that Bourbaki introduced the symbol Ø for the empty set and a dangerous bend symbol. Leave it to someone who doesn’t exist to shape the mathematical world we leave in today!
Who ever thinks that math isn’t fun has clearly not heard the story of Nicholas Bourbaki. (A.K.A the longest running joke in mathematics). As I was listening to the pod cast it was interesting to note all of the mathematical advancements that were made by someone who did not exist. So how did this person come into being? Well, it all began with 6 (7 depending on whose telling the story) mathematicians who wanted to write a better book than Gorsaph. Gorsaph, who was the one who had the established calculus book of that time, had written a poor book and was blamed with failing French mathematics. So, the group took it upon themselves to write a better one. However, they did not know if a “committee’ of people could write a book, consequently they decided on a name to represent the entire group: Nicholas Bourbaki.
ReplyDeleteThe group of mathematicians began with set theory and decided that that would be their foundation. The idea behind this was that they hoped people would see that a new math could be taught if they used set theory for their building block. It was because of them that rigor was introduced into math and not only did they add generalization to proofs, they put focus on the abstract as well. The reason we have well written proofs began with the efforts of Nicolas Bourbaki.
Seeing an email sent out by Dr Mojiri on mathematics being on Facebook, I decided to see if anything came up on Bourbaki. And what I found was a link to “his” profile as well as a Wikipedia page that contained the works completed by the group. Some of them are Set Theory, Algebra, Topology, and Integration. One of the other things that I found was that Bourbaki introduced the symbol Ø for the empty set and a dangerous bend symbol.
Leave it to someone who doesn’t exist to shape the mathematical world we leave in today!
Fernando Elizalde