Nicolas Bourbaki

1 person bested this! 1 person is curious.

Do you think this is the best?

Nicolas Bourbaki was born on December 10, 1934, in a café in Paris’ Quartier Latin, he worked at the Royal Poldavian Academy and later moved to the Mathematics Institute of the University of Nancago. In his Elements de mathématique he undertook nothing less than to completely rethink Mathematics from a structural point of view and provide a solid foundation for the whole body of modern mathematics. Inspired by the Hilbertian formalism the 40 published volumes of the Elements expose the fundamental concepts common to all branches of mathematics in a rigourous logical order based on set theory and introducing new vocabulary and notations (amongst those the now common symbol for the empty set ø, the use of the blackboard bold letters for the various sets of numbers, and the terms injective, surjective, and bijective). While being of enormous influence on 20th century mathematics Bourbaki's rigid, not to say dogmatic, style made it somewhat difficult to incorporate new developments after having achieved all of his main goals. Since 1983 no further volumes of the Elements have been published.

There were rumours about the existence of Nicolas Bourbaki: in 1949 the Encyclopedia Brittanica Book of the Year presented an article by Ralph Boas Jr. about Bourbaki in which he claimed Bourbaki to be just the collective pseudonym of a group of French mathematicians. But then other rumours say, that Ralph Boas Jr. is merely the collective pseudonym of the editors of Mathematical Reviews. ;)