Product Description

Customer Reviews (21)

To reiterate:a terrible book
This book reads like a bunch of 7th grade book reports about various individuals and topics strung together in roughly chronological order.Its character studies are shallow, the writing is bland, and its exposition of key ideas are embarrassingly shallow.I got it for $2 to try out my new Kindle.The good news is that the Kindle is fantastic.What an awful book though.

Just plain poorly written
As tempting as it may seem, do not get roped into reading this book.Admittedly, I purchased this book based solely on the blurb written on the back and my interest in mathematics.However, the story, as presented by Aczel, is not as intriguing as it obviously could be.In all honesty, reading the Wikipedia article on Nicolas Bourbaki is a much more worth-while experience.

The writing style is at once dull and long-winded.Ideas are repeated over and over again and far too much time is spent on topics only cursorily related to Bourbaki and its mathematics.When any detail is presented at all it is done so without exposition, without any real attempt to educate the reader.

The book literally reads like a poorly written high-school paper.

It's An OK Read If You Have Interest In The Subject
A moderately entertaining read.Aczel takes us behind the development of strutural mathematics as well as the Bourbaki group of French mathematicians - both the history and the personalities.There is precious little on art, candidly, and the mathematics is also quite light - focusing on set theory and the development of "New Math".Rather, it reads more like a biograpghy of a couple of the Bourbaki - Weil and Groethendieck, and not a real riveting one at that.The premise is interesting enough, and the book is OK if you have interest in the subject, but it is not Aczel's best work.

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. I like his writing, but was dissuaded by the extreme negativity of the reviews on this site. Finally, I decided to trust my gut. I enjoyed and profited from his version of Bourbaki. However, I think he may be out on a limb equating Grothendieck with Einstein.

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 founding the edifice of mathematics upon set theory. There is no mention of all the controversies and work done on the foundations and structures of mathematics prior to Bourbaki. For all the talk about Bourbaki and their investigation and championing of mathematical structures, the book says virtually nothing about what a mathematical structure is or looks like, or how the Bourbaki approach or the nature of their conception of mathematics differed from what preceded them, except to say they were rigorous and built mathematics upon set theory.

There is some mathematical terminology in the book, but no mathematics. The content is mostly biographical, with Andre Weil and Alexandre Grothendieck getting, in the final count, the most attention. The Bourbaki group's first meeting, in December of 1934, isn't mentioned until chapter seven, eighty pages in. From page 81 to page 127 the subject is Bourbaki, then the book shifts topic and is about Roman Jakobson, Claude Levi-Strauss and the rise of structuralism, including Roland Barthes, Jaques Lacan and others. The author claims that Bourbaki's structrual view of mathematics, their focus on mathematical structures and the structure of mathematics, is a major source, along with the linguists Sausurre and Jakobson, of what became, in the literary and sociological fields, Structuralism. The author displays no critical thought in these pages, and the presentation is superficial and misleading throughout.

For the mathematically adventurous, Leo Corry's book Modern Algebra and the Rise of Mathematical Structures places Bourbaki in historical context. See especially chapter 7, Nicolas Bourbaki: Theory of Structures, which is also available online as a .pdf file.
... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Alexander Grothendieck, André Weil, Nicolas Bourbaki, Séminaire Nicolas Bourbaki, Serge Lang, Jean-Pierre Serre, Claude Chevalley, Laurent Schwartz, Henri Cartan, Jean Dieudonné, Jacques Tits, Samuel Eilenberg, Armand Borel, John Tate, Charles Ehresmann, Szolem Mandelbrojt, Pierre Samuel, René de Possel, Roger Godement, Jacques Dixmier, Pierre Cartier, Jean-Louis Koszul, Jean Delsarte, François Bruhat. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 119. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Alexander Grothendieck (born March 28, 1928 in Berlin, Germany) is one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. He is known principally for his revolutionary advances in algebraic geometry, and also for major contributions to number theory, category theory and homological algebra, and his early achievements in functional analysis. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966. He was co-awarded the Crafoord Prize with Pierre Deligne in 1988, but Grothendieck declined this. He is noted for his mastery of abstract approaches to mathematics and his perfectionism in matters of formulation and presentation. In particular, he demonstrated the ability to derive concrete results using only very general methods. Relatively little of his work after 1960 was published by the conventional route of the learned journal, circulating initially in duplicated volumes of seminar notes; his influence was to a considerable extent personal, on French mathematics and the Zariski school at Harvard University. He retired in 1988 and within a few years became reclusive. Grothendieck's early mathematical work was done in functional analysis between 1949 and 1953 working on his doctoral thesis in Nancy, supervised by Jean Dieudonné and Laurent Schwartz. His key contributions include topological tensor products of to...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=2042 ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
Les achats comprennent une adhésion à l'essai gratuite au club de livres de l'éditeur, dans lequel vous pouvez choisir parmi plus d'un million d'ouvrages, sans frais. Le livre consiste d'articles Wikipedia sur : Laurent Schwartz, Jean-Pierre Serre, Nicolas Bourbaki, Alexandre Grothendieck, Henri Cartan, André Weil, Éléments de Mathématique, Alain Connes, Szolem Mandelbrojt, Roger Godement, Jean Dieudonné, Séminaire Nicolas Bourbaki, Adrien Douady, Bourbakisme, Charles Ehresmann, Claude Chevalley, Pierre Samuel, Armand Borel, Jean-Christophe Yoccoz, Yves Colin de Verdière, René de Possel, Joseph Oesterlé, Jean Delsarte, Pierre Cartier. Non illustré. Mises à jour gratuites en ligne. Extrait : Nicolas Bourbaki est un mathématicien imaginaire, sous le nom duquel un groupe de mathématiciens francophones, formé en 1935 à Besse-et-Saint-Anastaise (Besse-en-Chandesse à l'époque) en Auvergne sous l'impulsion d'André Weil, a commencé à écrire et éditer des textes mathématiques à la fin des années 1930. L'objectif premier était la rédaction d'un traité d'analyse. Le groupe s'est constitué en association, l'Association des amis de Nicolas Bourbaki, le 30 août 1952. Sa composition a évolué avec un renouvellement constant de générations. Sous le nom Nicolas Bourbaki fut publiée une présentation cohérente des mathématiques, appuyée sur la notion de structure, dans une série d'ouvrages sous le titre Éléments de mathématique. Cette œuvre est à ce jour inachevée. Elle a eu une influence sur l'enseignement des mathématiques et sur l'évolution des mathématiques du siècle. Toutefois, elle connaît de nombreuses critiques : incompatibilité entre le formalisme retenu et la théorie des catégories, , manque d'exemples, incompréhension des étudiants, etc. L'activité du groupe cependant a dépassé la rédaction d'ouvrages, par exemple avec l'organisation des séminaires Bourbaki. Le nom de famille Bourbaki était le nom emprunté par Raoul Husson en 1923 lor...http://booksllc.net/?l=fr ... Read more

Product Description
Facsimile reproduction of original Seminar Bourbaki ... Read more

Product Description
Aus Wikipedia. Nicht dargestellt. Auszug: The Swiss Transport Museum or Verkehrshaus der Schweiz, in Lucerne, is a museum, opened in July 1959 and exhibiting all forms of transport (including locomotives, automobiles, ships, and aircraft) as well as communications. The museum also maintains a large collection of work by Hans Erni, a local painter and sculptor. There are several other attractions in the museum besides the collection: It also houses EURECA, a 4.5 tonne satellite among the few space objects put into space and returned safely;EURECA and its return to Earth was a cooperative effort between several Western European countries and the United States in the 1990s. This article incorporates information from the equivalent article on the German Wikipedia. ...http://booksllc.net/?l=de ... Read more