
Nicolas Bourbaki: The greatest mathematician who never was (2019) - Hooke
https://theconversation.com/nicolas-bourbaki-the-greatest-mathematician-who-never-was-122845
======
kirubakaran
In the early days of HN, there was a super prolific user nickb
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21825207)
I guess we'll never know.

~~~
foobar_
I wonder if there can be a public version of this by sharing passwords openly
but in a twisted way.

1\. Create an account.

2\. To know the password, you visit a service that gives you the password.

3\. The service changes the password immediately in 10 seconds before which
you login.

4\. You can now post stuff with the account but can't change the password
allowing another user to chime in.

Now the service basically needs to not allow another user to login in 10
seconds. If the website doesn't allow multiple users to login then there needs
to be an etiquette of one user at a time, although you can kick off the user
after a definite amount of time if the website allows logout from all
sessions.

~~~
hadcomplained
Instead of providing a temporary password, can't that service just give a user
the session information that is sent to the server via cookies?

~~~
foobar_
Well that is clever.

Well lets see if it works ... I created this user overlookedscrum with a weak
enough password, but you don't know it so you can't reset it.

This is the cookie ~

key: user

value: overlookedscrum&DtTI0rbgf7YKKL0Xgy65I4cJFAi962sH

I tried it with two different browsers. It seems I can login freely, but can
you ?

I'll say ping below.

------
messe
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](https://www.uni-
muenster.de/Physik.TP/~munsteg/arnold.html)

~~~
enriquto
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.

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

~~~
drdeca
This comment seems to be self-describing.

Edit: ok, that may be a stretch, but I thought it was amusing because my
comment could also be interpreted as describing itself.

~~~
ves
I liked your comment!

To substantiate this comment, I’ll say that words describing themselves are
known as autonyms. So you marked out an autonomous comment.

------
eutropia
The group was a "Camerata"! There was a great talk at Rubyconf 2019 by Jessica
Kerr about groups like this all over history who move their respective fields
forward much faster than their contemporaries. She draws parallels to John Von
Neumann's group, Van Gogh and friends, and more.

She talks about how the groups work together for a time doing great things,
and then, and perhaps more importantly, the members of the group go on to do
amazing things on their own or even start "invisible colleges" of their own.

Talk:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oeigCANJVQ&list=PLE7tQUdRKc...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oeigCANJVQ&list=PLE7tQUdRKcyZDE8nFrKaqkpd-
XK4huygU&index=6&t=0s)

Slides:

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/zcgmrmz35jthvv3/Camerata-
rubyconf....](https://www.dropbox.com/s/zcgmrmz35jthvv3/Camerata-
rubyconf.pdf?dl=0)

------
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.

~~~
jbrooksuk
I came for the TOP reference and I was not disappointed.

------
data_ders
My favorite contribution of the Bourbaki group is the dangerous bend symbol!
Knuth even typeset it into TeX.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbaki_dangerous_bend_symbol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbaki_dangerous_bend_symbol)

------
tantalor
See also Blanche Descartes:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanche_Descartes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanche_Descartes)

 _The pseudonym originated by combining the initials of the mathematicians '
given names (Bill, Leonard, Arthur, and Cedric) to form BLAC. This was
extended to BLAnChe. The surname Descartes was chosen as a play on the common
phrase carte blanche._

------
melling
The BBC had an enjoyable podcast about famous mathematicians. Bourbaki was the
last episode.

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00srz5b/episodes/downloads](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00srz5b/episodes/downloads)

------
KKKKkkkk1
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.

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

~~~
esperent
People, including mathematicians, have been career driven for a lot longer
than we have been around.

------
toyg
The 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...](https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/tag/nicoletta-bourbaki/)

Published on Internazionale magazine:
[https://www.internazionale.it/tag/autori/nicoletta-
bourbaki](https://www.internazionale.it/tag/autori/nicoletta-bourbaki)

Medium:
[https://medium.com/@nicolettabourbaki](https://medium.com/@nicolettabourbaki)

* _Nicoletta_ is the feminine form of _Nicola_ , the Italian equivalent of Nicolas/Nicholas.

~~~
lutherb
More info on this kind of thing in the cultural field:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Blissett_(nom_de_plume)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Blissett_\(nom_de_plume\))

------
inetsee
I had read about "Bourbaki" in the past. I was not aware that the "Bourbaki"
group was still active.

~~~
gnulinux
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.

------
bitwize
...Except, perhaps, for Satoshi Nakamoto.

~~~
throwthe1917
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.

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

~~~
real_satoshi
Wrong again

~~~
esperent
That sounds like something Wei Dai would say.

------
fabatka
I think this is like saying: the greatest scientist of all time is "et al",
who mastered all disciplines (including mathematics).

Edit (clarification):

I mean, by conflating multiple people's work as one (by whatever criteria, in
this case a common pseudonym), comparison becomes meaningless.

~~~
eru
'et al' may be the most published author. But ibidem gets way more citations.

> I mean, by conflating multiple people's work as one (by whatever criteria,
> in this case a common pseudonym), comparison becomes meaningless.

Meaningless in a strict sense. But good enough as a hook for an article.

Compare also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Maria_Mierscheid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Maria_Mierscheid)

------
ZenOfTheArt
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 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](https://archive.org/details/AMathematiciansApology/page/n29)

~~~
derivativethrow
What does this comment mean?

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

~~~
ZenOfTheArt
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

