Nicolas Bourbaki: The Greatest Mathematician That Never Existed

For some mathematicians and some mathematical problems, clear presentation, standardized notation, etc. accelerates discovery.

That is a trivialization of what was at the time a great leap forward. War had shattered the old schools which had promoted the idea that each application had special methods and formulae which were fundamentally different from and incompatible with each other. The idea that people from radically different fields were all making similar use of the same concepts and could instead make use of the same robustly generalized concepts and formulae was so radical that it was necessary to hide behind a psuedonym because so many professionals felt their careers were put at risk by these meddlesome mathematicians. Nicholas Bourbaki took the mathematics of the time from something resembling magic incantations into the modern world of reasoning from base principles.