The artist and the mathematician : the story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the genius mathematician who never existed

"A real-life mathematical mystery Nicolas Bourbaki was perhaps the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century. Responsible for the emergence of the "new math" that swept through American and foreign education systems in the middle of the century, Bourbaki originated the modern concept of the mathematical proof and is credited with the introduction of rigor into the discipline. It can be said that no working mathematician in the world today is free of the influence of Nicolas Bourbaki's seminal work." "This is the story of both Bourbaki and the world that created him. And it is the story of an elaborate intellectual joke - because Bourbaki, the author of dozens of acclaimed papers and one of the foremost mathematicians of his day - never existed."--Jacket. Nicolas Bourbaki, whose mathematical publications began to appear in the late 1930s and continued to be published through most of the twentieth century, was a direct product as well as a major force behind an important revolution that took place in the early decades of the twentieth century that completely changed Western culture. Pure mathematics, the area of Bourbaki's work, seems on the surface to be an abstract field of human study with no direct connection with the real world. In reality, however, it is closely intertwined with the general culture that surrounds it. Major developments in mathematics have often followed important trends in popular culture; developments in mathematics have acted as harbingers of change in the surrounding human culture. The seeds of change, the beginnings of the revolution that swept the Western world in the early decades of the twentieth century -- both in mathematics and in other areas -- were sown late in the previous century. This is the story both of Bourbaki and the world that created him in that time. It is the story of an elaborate intellectual joke -- because Bourbaki, one of the foremost mathematicians of his day -- never existed. Acknowledgments -- 1. The disappearance -- 2. An arrest in Finland -- 3. Escape -- 4. Arrival in Paris -- 5. The general and the zeitgeist -- 6. When Braque met Picasso -- 7. The café -- 8. The achievements of Bourbaki -- 9. Bourbaki's reign -- 10. Claude Lévi-Strauss and the birth of structuralism -- 11. The linguistic origins -- 12. Structuralism in psychology, psychiatry, and economics -- 13. The literary group Oulip -- 14. Alexandre Grothendieck and the IHES -- 15. The death of Bourbaki and his legacy -- Selected bibliography -- Notes -- Index.