Nicolas Bourbaki
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
This gave rise to a cute inside joke in the Sokal hoax [0], where physicist Alan Sokal aimed to demonstrate the lack of intellectual rigour in contemporary post-modern cultural studies and produced a nonsensical "paper" (Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity) [1] that was promptly published in Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies.
At any rate, in that article, there's a footnote (to the hilarious statement that "More recently, Lacan's topologie du sujet has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism.") that reads:
> For a gentle introduction to set theory, see Bourbaki (1970).
Any competent peer reviewer reading the paper carefully would have fallen of the chair laughing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
[1] https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgre...
I find it amusing, given the context of the discussion, that people often fail to point this out.
[1] https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.2449...
https://www.bmj.com/content/335/7633/1320
It is fairly common for "serious scientific journals" to publish stuff occasionally which is explicitly not part of their normal formal peer reviewed content, but nevertheless they think is likely to be interesting for their readers.
The Science Wars issue was different from the business as normal publications of the journal, and explicitly contained stuff that they wouldn't usually publish.
Does it sound to you like some tongue-in-cheek discussions and joking around?
They stuck it in the special issue after he refused to make these changes.
Is putting it rather kindly.
She was a great thinker and writer; I highly recommend her works.
Obviously some ex-members of the group (Grothendieck and Serge Lang in particular) have published books that are more widely read.
I would also argue that each country / culture teaches mathematics in a different way, which may not suit well with an outsider. From my experience US/UK tend to emphasize intuition first and rigor later, while French mainly focus on rigorous reasoning and proofs, leaving intuition as a by-product of experience that will be eventually picked up by the student on his own. That may discourage non-French students to further read such books.
The Bourbaki group has repeatedly emphasized that point and explained their goal and rationale with the Elements; and yet, people still blame them for all sorts of developments in post-graduate mathematics education. I find it rather unbecoming.
That user was extremely prolific and, at that time was believed to be a group of people blessed by pg.
[1] https://twitter.com/i/flow/login?redirect_after_login=%2Fbet...
Is there a joke I'm missing?
That's why that wiki page says
Arnold was an outspoken critic of the trend towards high levels of abstraction in mathematics during the middle of the last century. He had very strong opinions on how this approach—which was most popularly implemented by the Bourbaki school in France—initially had a negative impact on French mathematical education, and then later on that of other countries as well.
All jesting aside, I still haven’t put together the reference to Nicolas Bourbaki in twentyone pilots’ “Nico and the Niners”. Just a clever history pun or something?
"He'll always try to stop me, that Nicolas Bourbaki He's got no friends close, but those who know him most know He goes by Nico"
It is indeed inspired by the actual pseudonym, not just a pun.