Path: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!newsxfer3.itd.umich.edu!newsfeed.direct.ca!torn!watserv3.uwaterloo.ca!undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca!neumann.uwaterloo.ca!alopez-o From: alopez-o@neumann.uwaterloo.ca (Alex Lopez-Ortiz) Newsgroups: sci.math,news.answers,sci.answers Subject: sci.math FAQ: Who is Bourbaki? Followup-To: sci.math Date: 17 Feb 2000 22:52:02 GMT Organization: University of Waterloo Lines: 32 Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.Edu Expires: Sun, 1 Mar 1998 09:55:55 Message-ID: <88hu2i$qu4$1@watserv3.uwaterloo.ca> Reply-To: alopez-o@neumann.uwaterloo.ca NNTP-Posting-Host: daisy.uwaterloo.ca Summary: Part 15 of 31, New version Originator: alopez-o@neumann.uwaterloo.ca Originator: alopez-o@daisy.uwaterloo.ca Xref: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu sci.math:347388 news.answers:177508 sci.answers:11216 Archive-name: sci-math-faq/bourbaki Last-modified: February 20, 1998 Version: 7.5 Who is N. Bourbaki? A group of mostly French mathematicians which began meeting in the 1930s, aiming to write a thorough unified account of all mathematics. They had tremendous influence on the way math is done since. For a very accessible sampler see Dieudonne Mathematics: The Music Of Reason (Orig. Pour L'honneur De L'esprit Humain). The founding is described in Andre Weil's autobiography, titled something like ``memoir of an apprenticeship" (orig. Souvenirs D'apprentissage). There is a usable book Bourbaki by J. Fang. Liliane Beaulieu has a book forthcoming, which you can sample in ``A Parisian Cafe and Ten Proto-Bourbaki Meetings 1934-1935" in the Mathematical Intelligencer 15 no.1 (1993) 27-35. The history behind Bourbaki is also described in Scientific American, May 1957. _________________________________________________________________ -- Alex Lopez-Ortiz alopez-o@unb.ca http://www.cs.unb.ca/~alopez-o Assistant Professor Faculty of Computer Science University of New Brunswick