Slashdot Mirror
Founder of the Secret Society of Mathematicians
Anti-Globalism suggests an article at Science News on the passing of Henri Cartan, one of the founding members of a strange and influential group of French mathematicians in the twentieth century. "In the 1930s, a group of young French mathematicians led an uprising that revolutionized mathematics. France had lost most of a generation in the First World War, so the emerging hotshots in mathematics had few elders to look up to. And when these radicals did look up, they didn't like what they saw. The practice of mathematics at the time was dry, scattered and muddled, they believed, in need of reinvention and invigoration... Using the nom de plume Nicolas Bourbaki (after a dead Napoleonic general), they wrote a series of textbooks laying out mathematics the right way. Though the young mathematicians started out only intending to write a good textbook for analysis..., they ended up creating dozens of volumes which formed a manifesto for a new philosophy of mathematics. The last of the founders of Bourbaki, Henri Cartan, died August 13 at age 104... Two of his students won the Fields medal..., one won the Nobel Prize in physics and another won the economics Nobel."
Attach the stone of triumph!
They made Steve Guttenberg a star.
Imagine a bunch of mathematicians, meeting secretly and proving under the light of the torches that a solution existed for all the problems of the world... and yet, not knowing what the solution was.
Priceless
Es dry and scataired. We shall revolutionise thees field, for what is pi without a nice sauce? Later we shall riot in the street over the suspension of sauce for our pi.
"Secret society" is a bit over the top! I always had the impression it had the feeling more of a running joke; from the article:
Though it wasn't *just* a joke--they wrote a lot of very serious mathematics!
Hell is other mathematicians.
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
Bourbaki books are the most boring books you can buy. Avoid them at all costs. If you want to study mathematics, there are much better books.
Their motto is to never explain anything. These makes these books completely unreadable. Mathematics the right way ccroding to them is:
--no example: examples are evil being that stray us from the true path of pure abstraction.
--never mention any applications: are you nuts ? mathematics must remain pure. Applied mathematics are the spawn of the devil. If it serves some purpose, it's not mathematics anymore.
--Don't draw anything. Drawings are tools of the devil. 2D domains and geometrical figures should only exists as pure abstraction.
--The less explanations, the better: only idiots needs explanations.
--Never rewrite a theorem for the sake of clarity: having 20 references to other theorems
(usually in another volume) in a 5 lines proof
is better for clarity (don't even write the name of the Theorem you refer to, a true mathematician knows them by volume and page number).
And better they add insult to the injury in the preface: "no prerequisite knowledge of math is needed to read this book". Yeah whatever.
From what I can tell, Metascore is an attempt by mathematicians to take over the government. In fact, every government.
http://www.metascore.org/
Difference is they do not seem to be very secretive.
There is no Nobel prize for professional wrestling, astrology, flatulence or economics. Stopp spreading bullshit.
I don't want to get off on a tangent, but the whole group seem kind of irrational.
How does someone become a member of this finite group? Do they have to stand in the middle while the rest of them form a perfect square around them? I wonder if they have to hide their identity?
oh well, at least at the end there's pi!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
This was common knowledge when I was taking advanced Math classes in mid 1970's.
Oh, Anonymous Coward, how I love your posts. The complete disregard to logic, spelling and grammar appearing in every topic has become my warm security blanket. You are the nougat center of my candybar and I will henceforth use random caps keys while starting all sentences with a lowercase letter - or better an ampersand - as a show of the esteem I hold you in.
& sINCE yOU post this in every topic perhaps you might want to edit the oRIGINAL.
pS, I work for the gOVERNMENT and we are tracking you. yOU should quit doing that thing with anime porn or yOU"LL go blind.
Wrong. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/
Now about my spectacular flatulence...
From TFA:
The result was austere books with almost no examples, guide for intuition or pictures. Philip Davis of Brown University described them in an article in SIAM News as "mathematics with all its juices extracted; bare bones, skeletonic, anorexic stuff; Twiggy dressed in the tunic of Euclid." Michael Atiyah of the University of Edinburgh says: "They're not designed to be read. They're designed to set out a the is for how mathematics ought to be done."
Any they thought other books were dry? I guess books like this may have some use for hard core math types, but they sound like horrible books for almost anyone else. Examples, pictures, and the likes are very important for learning. Designing books not to be read seems like silly exercise.
Aargh! From these mathematicians grew the "New Math" of the early 1960's.
During the 1950's, high school math was mainly geometry, algebra, trig, and calculus.
Then came the New Math. Imported from France, it emphasized set theory, number bases, and abstract number theory. Students learned cardinality, commutative laws, associative laws, and "pure" math, with less applied math and problem-solving.
Many educators (and even more parents) saw the New Math as being too abstract for daily use and undercutting concrete skills such as computation. Physicists, especially objected, when college freshmen could calculate in multiple number bases, but couldn't solve algebraic equations.
Mathematician/singer Tom Lehrer wrote the song,"New Math", with the line, "It's so very simple that only a child can do it!"
One book, Why Johnny Can't Add - the Failure of the New Math, pointed out that in the mid 1970's teachers applauded the death of the New Math. By the late 70's, algebra was back in style, and even trigonometry was being taught. So ended the French invasion of high school math classes.
The latest, of course, is the new-new-math, also called rain-forest math. Don't get me started...
"From steadily fucking," eh? Well, sir -- I wish I had YOUR problems.
Is the group's works available online somewhere? I'd like to see their condensed style.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
wrong. Stopp spreading bullshit. that's the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, and unrelated to the Nobel prizes.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Dedicated to the ongoing fight against the "show your work" admonitions of math teachers everywhere.
Have gnu, will travel.
I survived four years of New Math - it was so easy that you couldn't do anything wrong. Straight A's in math.
Then I got to college and met all those equations. Everyone else solved them but me. Two weeks into chem 101 and I was flailing.
It's true - the Bourbaki group *invented* the New Math, and pushed it into classrooms around the world. Millions of adults are now math-illerates because of these oh-so-pure mathematicians.
Our math teacher said "If someone says 'It's very Bourbaki', they mean 'It's very bad'".
He was not a big fan of the Bourbaki-style math literature. And I understand why.
Anti-globalists use the Internet to fight globalism?
Isn't that like Al Gore flying around in his 727 to fight global warming?
No you don't - although of course I did marry a lawyer, so you probably mean something different when saying "fucking"
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
They can make RTFA about mathematicians to sound like this is an article about some couturier. Well.. It's all geometry after all! .. AND applied to nude models ;) so this "secret society" should be into something, eh
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
Wow...
It's been years since I came to read slashdot, and in a post about french mathematicians, I see no rabid flaming comments about cowardly defeats and other french-bashing pseudo-jokes.
I'm almost shocked.
Apparently, slashdot's evolution was not limited to its web page layout.
Don't worry, it isn't funny.
(Simpsons parody of the Stonemasons)
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
You're funny. You have no idea what mathematics actually are, do you? Or how hard core this stuff is *supposed* to be.
I wonder if this has something to do with the awesome victory achieve in Iraq by the super powerful US army? The meme was propped up when Chirac was telling you guys that Iraq would be a quagmire. Silly Jacques!
The following examples may help to clarify the difference between the new and old math.
1960: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of this price. What is his profit?
1970 (Traditional math): A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80. What is his profit?
1975 (New Math): A logger exchanges a set L of lumber for a set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100 and each element is worth $1.
(a) make 100 dots representing the elements of the set M
(b) The set C representing costs of production contains 20 fewer points than set M. Represent the set C as a subset of the set M.
(c) What is the cardinality of the set P of profits?
1990 (Dumbed-down math): A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Underline the number 20.
1997 (Whole Math): By cutting down a forest full of beautiful trees, a logger makes $20.
(a) What do you think of this way of making money?
(b) How did the forest birds and squirrels feel?
(c) Draw a picture of the forest as you'd like it to look.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
I had new math and as a result my equation solving ability was utterly horrible and honestly still is... but I did find that new math laid the groundwork for databases down the road... cardinality and set theory are sort of the gist of databases... and, well, commutative and associativity are useful for understanding operators in programming languages.
This is my sig.
1. Bourbaki was not a "secret society", although it didn't publish a membership list because membership wasn't particularly official. Even some non-French mathematicians participated occasionally.
2. They did not publish "text" books, they published carefully written reference books.
3. The reputation was they they met once a year or so in a nice French resort with a reputation for good wine, to enjoy themselves and argue about the best wording for proofs in the next volumes.
4. While in principle, you might read Bourbaki without a previous grounding -- indeed, substantial preparation -- in practice, it is not likely.
A handful of people who read slashdot may have read some Bourbaki, but it's hard to imagine cultures more different than the slapdash opinions here, and the carefully crafted logic and style which underlies the Bourbaki compendia.
(D. Erbach writing as AC)