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The Artist and the Mathematician: The Story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the Genius Mathematician Who Never Existed
 
 
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The Artist and the Mathematician: The Story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the Genius Mathematician Who Never Existed (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: discussion with the author, mathematical group, structural ideas, André Weil, Alexandre Grothendieck, Nicolas Bourbaki (more...)
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lay readers interested in mathematical history will learn a lot they didn't know from Aczel's latest book, which focuses on a group of French mathematicians who in the 1930s decided to publish their collective work under an imaginary name. But readers may also get the feeling that this able math and science popularizer is running out of suitable topics. It's not that the contributions of the Bourbaki school weren't important—their rigorous approach to proofs and emphasis on set theory provided the basis for what became known as the New Math—it's just that this curious story isn't as inherently dramatic as, say, that of Andrew Wiles's solving Fermat's Last Theorem. Aczel surveys with his usual panache the careers of some major members of the group, like the eccentric Alexandre Grothendieck, who in 1991 became a hermit in the Pyrenees, but Aczel is less convincing when he draws simplistic parallels between advances in mathematics and modern art. While always readable, this diffuse narrative (including chapters on Bourbaki's influence on anthropology and linguistics) strains to pull its disparate parts into a satisfactory whole. (Oct. 10)
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Product Description

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.
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Basic Books (August 17, 2006)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1560259310
  • ISBN-13: 978-1560259312
  • Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #767,324 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Amir D. Aczel
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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discussion with the author, mathematical group, structural ideas
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André Weil, Alexandre Grothendieck, Nicolas Bourbaki, New York, United States, Henri Cartan, Laurent Schwartz, Andre Weil, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Cartier, Simone Weil, Armand Borel, Claude Chevalley, Second World War, École Normale Supérieure, New School, Circle of Prague, University of Strasbourg, Jean-Pierre Serre, Roman Jakobson, Spanish Civil War, Albert Einstein, Collège de France, François Le Lionnais, General Bourbaki
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Customer Reviews

18 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
2.5 out of 5 stars (18 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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42 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars A massively wasted opportunity, December 13, 2006
Amir Aczel is as frustrating an author as you will find anywhere. The man is bright, no question about it. He also has impeccable taste when it comes to interesting subjects to investiagte. He has written books on various mathematical subjects: Fermat's Last Theorem, Descarte, and now Nicolas Bourbaki. Yet his followthrough and his writing habits are infuriatingly inconsistent and shows signs of discordant chaos in his reasoning. He also has a disconcerting proclivity towards doing a hack job on a subject to get paid and then moving on to better things.

The story of Bourbaki is a fascinating one, so I was eager to read this book. The miniscule size of this book should have been a red flag, Aczel's reputation, at least in my head, should have been another, but I proceeded to buy it because I am an eternal optimist and I believe that people can and will surprise me and change my preconceived notions.

It didn't work this time, nor any other times when I placed my faith in Aczel. So where to begin?

1) As the previous reviewers had stated, there are no math in this book. No explanation of what Bourbaki was up to. How do you write a book on mathematicians without writing about mathematics? I understand that one does not wish to populate the book with excesive mathematical details but the power of math is in its compact notations. He does try to explain things in general terms, but a few figures and a few lines of math would have done wonders to his narrative.
2) Not enough back ground material was covered. When Aczel is trying to explain the application of structuralism in linguistics and in psychology, he was doing some extremely fine narration of extremely dense and abstract ideas and putting them into the context of what Levi-Strauss and others are trying to do, but he was not consistent in narrating the other parts of the book, he did a lot of hand waving and hot air generating.
3) As an author writing about people, one can definitely become enamoured with certain people and grow to dislike certain others. Aczel definitely fell in love with Alexander Grothendieck's story and disliked Andre and Simohne Weil. It is irresponsible, however, for Aczel come out and say that the reason for the demise of Bourbaki is because Grothendieck left the group without explaining fully WHY category theory is a more reasonable foundation. It is equally irresponsible for the ad hominem attacks on Andre Weil's character without citing specific instances of his behavior.
4) The book reads like a very bad draft, there is no continuity to the history and the book is not built around mathematical logic nor is it based on chronological order, it is as if Aczel decided to put all these bits of stories and mathematics together haphazardously. The writing is very jagged. Reading and making sense of the story is extremely fatiguing because the author made every effort to confuse the reader. Many anecdotes are repeated for no apparent reason and they are repeated without qualifiers or additional information.
5) There does not seem to be any care taken to build a case for or against anything. The author just scattered facts and his own opinions out and it was up to the readers to figure out a logic for themselves.
6) As in his previous books, the author seem to be building toward a conclusion, a crescendo in the narrative, yet after the build up, there is no crescendo, nor a diminuendo, there is just a monotone white noise in the background.

Like I said, this is a massively wasted effort towards a very interesting subject. The only thing that I have gotten from this book is the germination of various subjects that the author mentioned in passing, so thank you Amir Aczel for your bibliography and a desultory book report.
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Worse even than the previous reviewers indicated, January 2, 2007
By Rebecca Allen (Brookline, NH) - See all my reviews
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I picked it up at my local library without previously having looked at reviews online. What a mistake! I kept thinking it had to get better, and it didn't, really, altho as one reviewer noted, the explanation of the influence of structuralism on Levi-Strauss was useful (but irritating).

In addition to no explanation of the math (which meant I kept looking stuff up online -- Aczel's choice makes some sense. Trying to explain category theory in a short, mass-market book would be even worse than what Aczel did do), choppy jumping around from person to person and within a person's lifetime (like he was trying to invent cliffhangers) and generally not being what the cover matter would lead you to believe (somehow explaining New Math, which it only barely does in passing, or telling an entertaining story of an academic prank, which it kind of does, but isn't what the book is really about), Aczel's attempts to place Bourbaki and structuralism in a larger cultural setting are intellectually bankrupt. You just cannot show that Bourbaki and a bunch of French mathematicians somehow convinced the rest of the arts and sciences of the need for structure/rigor/whatever, and ignore the fact that this was all occurring at the same time as Nazism/fascism/Stalinism. Like that is somehow an accident or coincidence? I think not. And I suspect that Aczel didn't think this through, which, given the people he's writing about, might be ironic, but apparently he's famous for this so it can't really be considered unexpected.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Poorly titled, poorly written!, December 21, 2006
By Concerned Educator (Egg Harbor, NJ) - See all my reviews
Unlike the other reviewers, I was not interested in detailed discussions of the mathematics that the Bourbaki group wrote. I heard the author plugging his book on the radio and the topic sounded interesting. However, when I started reading the book it did not cover what he was talking about in much detail. The first half of the book is a poorly conveyed life history of the various mathematicians in the group. The book lacks cohesion and continuity. The book is not very long, but the author repeats material in later chapters that was covered in earlier chapters. I can not believe that any publisher would publish such a poorly written book.

I am a Physics instructor that emphasizes the importance of good writing even in technical fields. This is a perfect example that I often cite to my students of someone in a technical field that does not know how to convey his thoughts because he failed his English course.
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3.0 out of 5 stars Better than the Reviews
I have The Mystery of the Aleph, The Riddle of the Compass, Fermat's Last Theorem, and even Complete Business Statistics. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Tim Giles

2.0 out of 5 stars The Artist and the Mathematician

This book gives the impression that the Bourbaki group alone discovered and laid bare the mathematical structures studied in modern mathematics and originated the idea of... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Sam Adams

4.0 out of 5 stars Bourbaki -- Here, There & Everywhere
Amir D. Aczel's short text is a frustrating read. It starts with an account of Alexandre Grothendieck burning 25,000 pages of his mathematical work. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Gary C. Marfin

1.0 out of 5 stars Maddening
Brief review for a brief book: Very disappointing. My expectation had been something similar to 'The Professor and the Madman' which is an excellent non-fiction account of... Read more
Published 12 months ago by B. Fine

4.0 out of 5 stars Does a decent job for a 240 pages mass-market book
I was expecting something bad after reading the customer reviews (many 1 star). But no, I am satisfied so 4 stars. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Carl Genest

5.0 out of 5 stars At least one other criticism false
I am writing this review, simply because I am a great fan of Aczel's other books -- fermat's last theory, entanglement, and his book on the discovery of the compass, and for... Read more
Published 15 months ago by Enjoy Books, Ken

4.0 out of 5 stars A good solid biography of a collective individual
The idea of a collective individual named Nicolas Bourbaki
seems to be a communism ( small C) of mathematics. Read more
Published 15 months ago by R. Bagula

1.0 out of 5 stars fluff & fuss, but where's the math?
This book is disappointing on a number of levels. I'll mention just a few. First, it is peppered with overstated superlatives. Read more
Published on October 15, 2007 by J. G. Gimbel

3.0 out of 5 stars Bell Curve Appraisal
The first third to half of the book read as an encyclopedia article i.e. Nicolas's father was born in 1893. He worked in a grocery store for five years. His mother etc., etc. Read more
Published on September 5, 2007 by Giuse Euler

1.0 out of 5 stars If you want to waste your money....
I am very sorry to say but this is a very bad book.
For people who are familiar with the Bourbaki group it adds nothing to what is easily available in journals,... Read more
Published on August 30, 2007 by F. J. Craveiro de Carvalho

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