The mathematician who doesn’t exist
A secret society of mathematicians has been working under a pseudonym for nearly a century Shutterstock/Stephen Ray Chapman One of the most important mathematicians in the world has been working for almost a century, producing dozens of books totalling thousands of pages that have served as a guiding light for the entire field. His name is Nicolas Bourbaki, and he doesn’t exist. Bourbaki is a pseudonym for a secret society of mathematicians. First formed in France in 1934, the group began with a simple goal: to update mathematical textbooks and make them more suitable for a contemporary audience. Instead, it created an entirely new way of writing mathematics that would make waves for decades. Initially, the group thought that its work would be around a thousand pages long and take six months. By 1935, Bourbaki had decided to write a series of six books, each building upon the previous one to “provide a solid foundation for the whole body of modern mathematics”, as later stated in an explanatory introduction. The group thought it would run …
