How a Mathematician Who Never Existed Changed the World
How 7 guys created the greatest mathematician in the world
Nicolas Bourbaki made exceptional contributions to mathematics — except he never existed.
In the 1930s, the world of mathematics was shattered due to the deaths of so many mathematicians in the First World War. Many mathematicians had died in that time, and it was hard for one mathematician to even find another mathematician who worked in the same field as them.
On December 10, 1934, in France, Nicolas Bourbaki was born who would later go on to become one of the greatest in the field, a Russian genius who wouldn’t appear publicly. But there is a slight problem. Nicolas Bourbaki never existed.
It was a pseudonym for a group of 7 mathematicians from different fields, originally created to improve their university textbook in analysis because they were unsatisfied by it. But they ended up doing a lot more work and developed a series of textbooks called Éléments de mathématique.
The six original members met at a cafe in Paris and decided that they would write a better textbook than the existing textbook which was a very bad one. It lacked good explanations and examples.
