Philip Swan Swan itibaren Bont-newydd, Saint Asaph LL17 0HH, Združeno kraljestvo
Heck yeah.
In the 1930’s, a group of top French mathematicians who thought that the math of their day was sloppy, decided to rewrite the entire math and bring rigor, abstraction, generality, and structure to it. They picked on an old college prank and decided to publish their work under the name of Nicolas Bourbanki, a mathematician from the Republic of Poldevia! For a few decades, this group, with a few generations of members, became immensely influential in how math was taught and done all over the world. Then they fizzled out and disappeared for various reasons – mostly because they achieved what they set out to do. Rigor became name of the game in math and the group lacked the vision, leadership, and motivation to do anything else. This book is Bourbanki’s story. I found the story quite interesting given that I’d never heard of it. However, I liked the book less that its story because I thought Aczel was trying to over-dramatize for the sake of attracting the lay reader. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (“the father of structuralism”) asked the founding member of Bourbanki to model and solve a problem for him regarding some strange marriage customs of aboriginal Australians. Aczel picks up on this story to claim that the whole structuralism movement in anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, literary theory, etc. was inspired by Bourbanki’s ideas of structures – a very far-fetched claim – and he adds a few chapters covering these subjects. Bourbanki erected the entire mathematics on the foundation of set theory, ignoring Russell’s Paradox and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem that showed that set theory wasn’t airtight rigorous and had holes in it. Then chaos and fractals and catastrophe theories came along and showed that you can do math without structures. In social sciences, structuralism gave way postmodernism. And… rest in peace Bourbanki.
This story was beautiful. While I wasn't completely engaged with the first book of the series this second one was amazing. The characters are absolutely unique and you can't not fall in love with them, both Shane and Mikhail.