{"id":24773,"date":"2007-10-15T10:00:01","date_gmt":"2007-10-15T10:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2007\/10\/15\/nicolas-bourbaki-perhaps-the-biggest-inside-joke-in-mathematics\/"},"modified":"2007-10-15T10:00:01","modified_gmt":"2007-10-15T10:00:01","slug":"nicolas-bourbaki-perhaps-the-biggest-inside-joke-in-mathematics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20071015-01\/?p=24773","title":{"rendered":"Nicolas Bourbaki, perhaps the biggest inside joke in mathematics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> If you&#8217;ve studied advanced mathematics, you&#8217;ve certainly read or at least heard about the books and papers of the great French mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki, whose works in the 1930&#8217;s set out a rigorous formulation of modern mathematics. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=6503411\"> Except he never actually existed<\/a>. The name was created as a front for a group of renegade French mathematicians who were reacting to Poincar&eacute;&#8217;s intuitive approach. <\/p>\n<p> In modern graph theory, I&#8217;m told that it is fashionable to publish one&#8217;s results under false names. For example, the graph theorist <a href=\"http:\/\/scholar.google.com\/scholar?q=%22gw+peck%22\"> G. W. Peck<\/a> was actually a collaboration of the mathematicians <a href=\"http:\/\/www-cse.ucsd.edu\/facresearch\/facultyprofiles\/GrahamR.html\"> Ronald Graham<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.uiuc.edu\/~west\/\"> Douglas West<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.uc.edu\/people\/faculty\/dr-george-purdy\"> George Purdy<\/a>, the legendary <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Paul_Erd%C5%91s\"> Paul Erd&#337;s<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/math.ucsd.edu\/~fan\/\">Fan Chung<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www-math.mit.edu\/~djk\/\"> Daniel Kleitman<\/a>. (Take the initials of the members&#8217; last names.) I learned from Dr.&nbsp;West that the group did not include him originally, and they were prepared to publish under the name &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0000060\/\">G.&nbsp;Peck<\/a>&#8220;, listing the author&#8217;s address as Hollywood, California. With the addition of a new member, the name changed to &#8220;G.&nbsp;W.&nbsp;Peck&#8221;, which to the group&#8217;s pleasant surprise happened to be <a href=\"http:\/\/bioguide.congress.gov\/scripts\/biodisplay.pl?index=P000176\"> the name of a United States Congressman from the 19th century<\/a>, which gave them the opportunity to include a photograph and a short biography that ended with something like &#8220;After retiring from Congress, Peck returned to his first love: graph theory.&#8221; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve studied advanced mathematics, you&#8217;ve certainly read or at least heard about the books and papers of the great French mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki, whose works in the 1930&#8217;s set out a rigorous formulation of modern mathematics. Except he never actually existed. The name was created as a front for a group of renegade French [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-24773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>If you&#8217;ve studied advanced mathematics, you&#8217;ve certainly read or at least heard about the books and papers of the great French mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki, whose works in the 1930&#8217;s set out a rigorous formulation of modern mathematics. Except he never actually existed. The name was created as a front for a group of renegade French [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24773\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}