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The Bourbaki Tribe

“La Tribu” (“The Tribe”) was the internal Journal of the Bourbaki group between 1940 and 1977.

It’s main purpose was to record the editorial decisions made during the Bourbaki congresses, but it always started out with a humorous account of some of the events during their meeting, including a list of all people and things attending it.s

Some time ago, I’ve used the then available issues of “La Tribu” to locate the Hotels, Abbeys, Spas etc. where the Bourbaki congresses took place between 1940 and 1960. Here are some links:

In one of these post I pleaded:

“Dear Collaborators of Nicolas Bourbaki, please make all Bourbaki material (Diktat, La Tribu, versions) publicly available, certainly those documents older than 50 years.”

Last time I checked the Bourbaki Archives I was delighted that by now they have released all issues of “La Tribu” until 1970!

A few more places for me to locate, and a lot more fun intros to read.

I definitely do plan to do something with all the issues of “La Tribu”, either here, or in a different format, perhaps on YouTube.

For this reason I’ve renamed my ‘channel’ (containing just one clip on Mochizuki made 11 years ago) to “TheBourbakiTribe” (once again, note “La Tribu”=”The Tribe”).

I’m still trying to find a clip-format I feel comfortable with, so right now I’m testing things out, continuing my series of posts on Bourbaki and the 21 pilots storyline of Trench/Dema/Clancy.

In order to separate those from plain Bourbaki-history posts, I’ll prepend their title with their logo |-/ .
Here’s a first attempt:

It’s about one of their Photoshop mysteries. Two extra people were shopped in the classic Dieulefit/Beauvallon 1938 photograph, and one of them, ‘bearded man’, remained elusive. Here’s my best guess of the edited picture based on recent suggestions/finds:

Bearded man was created from the head of Jacques Hadamard, and the body of Alexander Grothendieck. In the clip I try to find out why this might make sense, in the |-/ multiverse.

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Closure (2)

I told you six months ago that I’ll be out of my office by the end of summer and will no longer have access to the webserver running this blog.

There’s a slight possibility that the new inhabitant is willing to inherit said iMac and as long as (s)he doesn’t shut it down, this site may be online for a few extra months.

With help from Pieter Belmans I managed to create a static version of this blog on GitHub. Its URL is

https://lievenlebruyn.github.io/neverendingbooks

All internal links should work (if not, please tell me) and if you ever bookmarked a post here with URL something like
http://www.neverendingbooks.org/that_post
you’ll be able to view it till eternity comes using this URL: https://lievenlebruyn.github.io/neverendingbooks/that_post.

The more you link to the static GitHub version from now on, the more likely it is all static NeB posts will show up in a Google search.

I may even continue to blog and will update the GitHub repository whenever I can.

If you ever come in a similar situation (WordPress blogger, whose server will become unavailable, and want to set up a static version of your blog, with the possibility to keep on blogging) I’ll walk you through the main steps (and, if I could do this, anyone can).

1. Install Local.WP

On a computer you will continue to have access to, say your laptop (not serving to the web) install Local.WP which allows you to build local WordPress sites.

2. Clone your blog locally

Set up a default WP-blog, name it as your blog, say myblog, install all plugins you have on your regular blog and set it up to use your preferred theme.

Then. clone your blog with the export/import tool from WP. That is, export your blog and then import it in this local blog and delete the standard first post and page local.WP created.

Oh, and make sure you local site serves https (may be important later if you want to use the GitHub API). The local.wp helpfiles provide you with all info.

3. Get all internal links right

Install the Better search and replace plugin.

Use it to set all your internal links right. Assume your blog has address http://myblog.org and your local version serves it at https://myblog.local do a global search and replace of these two terms.

Check if indeed all local links (including images) work.

4. Make a GitHub repository

Set up a GitHub account, let’s call is myname and set up your first repository and name it after your blog myblog.

5. Do the Simply Static magic

Install on your local blog the Simply Static wordpress plugin.

In the general settings of Simply Static choose for replacing URLs ‘Absolute URLs’ and for scheme/host choose https://myname.github.io/myblog and force URL replacements.

Choose as your deployment method ‘ZIP archive’ and hit generate. When it finishes download the ZIP file.

6. Upload to GitHub pages

Upload the obtained folder to your GitHub repository and make it into a Github-page (lots of pages tell you how you can do both). You’re done, your static site is now available at https://myname.github.io/myblog.

If you would opt for the paid version of Simply Static the last step is done automatically (hence the importance of the https scheme on your local clone) and it promises to make even comments to your static site available as well as semi-automatic updates if you write a new post on your local blog.

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Vialism versus Weilism

Here’s how 21 pilots themselves define Vialism, the ‘religion’ of Dema, in the ‘I am Clancy’ video:

Their authority comes from two things: a miraculous power and a hijacked religion. One feeds the other. A cycle. It’s called Vialism, and all you really need to know is that it teaches that self-destruction is the only way to paradise.



Some people think that Vialism means Weilism, after the Weil siblings Andre and Simone.

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a French philosopher and political activist. In her later years she became increasingly religious and inclined towards mysticism.

Andre Weil (1906-1998) was a French mathematician and founding member of the Bourbaki group.



They enter the lore via a picture on Tyler Joseph’s desktop in the Zane Lowe interview in 2018, which is an overlay of two photographs of Bourbaki meetings in 1937 and 1938 featuring Andre and Simone.

For Simone this is the crucial period in her conversion to Catholicism, for Andre these meetings led to a reformulation of the foundations of TOPology, and discussions on Bourbaki’s version of Set theory which would lead to Bourbaki’s first book, published in 1939.

Both topics left a lasting impression on Simone Weil, as she wrote in 1942:

One field of mathematics that deals with all the diverse sorts of orders (set theory and general topology) is a treasure-house that holds an infinity of valuable expressions that show supernatural truth.

Now, Simone was fairly generous in her use of the adjective ‘supernatural’. Here’s another quote:

“The supernatural greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.”

This suggests that if Vialism really is Weilism, then the ‘miraculous power’ might be mathematics (or at least the topics of set theory and topology), and the ‘hijacked religion’ might be the (ab)use of mathematics in theology.

Roughly speaking, axiomatic Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory gives a precise list of instructions to construct all sets out of two given sets, the empty set $\emptyset$ (the set containing nothing) being one of them.

Emptiness, or the void, is important in Simone Weil’s theology, see for example her book Love in the void: where God finds us



or consider this quote by her:

God stripped himself of his godhood and became empty, and fulfilled us with false godhood. Let us strip off this false godhood and become empty. This very act is the ultimate purpose to creating us.

which sounds a lot like Vialism, becoming an ’empty vessel’ for the Bishops (or God) to fill.

Also in 21 pilots’ iconography, the empty set $\emptyset$ is important.



Btw. the symbol $\emptyset$ for the empty set was first used by Andre Weil who remembered the Norwegian ‘eu’ from his studies of nordic languages preparing for his ‘Finnish fugue’ in 1939.

The other pre-given set challenges the Gods and theology. The Axiom of Infinity in the Zermelo-Fraenkel system asserts the existence of an infinite set, usually denoted $\omega$ and interpreted as the set of all finite numbers $\{ 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,\dots \}$.

In other words, mathematical set theory contains an object which is actual infinity!

From the ancient Greeks on to early modern times, philosophers adhered to the motto “Infinitum actu non datur”, there is only a potential infinity (the idea of infinity) but actual infinity belongs to the realm of the Gods (infinite power, infinite wisdom,…).

As if this was not heretic enough, in comes Georg Cantor.



Georg Cantor (1845-1918) might very well be another Clancy.

He was a German mathematician, discoverer of the secrets of infinity, which brought him in conflict with several influential mathematicians in his time (notably Kronecker and Poincare), and inventor of Cardinal numbers (compare Bishops).

He suffered from depression and mental illness, was often admitted to the Halle nerve clinic. In between he was a founding member of the DEutscher MAthematiker Vereinigung (DeMa) of which he was the first president (Nico), he suffered from malnourishment during WW1 (compare Simone Weil in WW2) and died of a heart attack in the sanatorium where he had spent the last year of his life.

Cantor showed that the only distinguishing feature between two sets is their Cardinality (Bishopy power), roughly speaking the number of things they contain. He then showed that for every set of a certain Bishopy power, there’s one of even higher power!

For example, there exists a set with higher cardinality than $\omega$, that is, a set we cannot enumerate. An example is described in these lines from Morph

Lights they blink to me, transmitting things to me
Ones and zeroes, ergo this symphony
Anybody listening? Ones and zeroes
Count to infinity, ones and zeroes

They’re talking about all possible infinite series of $0$’s and $1$’s and one quickly proves that these cannot be enumerated using Cantor’s diagonal argument.

When applied to theology this says that Gods cannot have any actual infinity power, for there’s always an entity posessing higher powers.

That’s why Cantor resolved to God being ‘absolute infinity’, the Bishopy power of the class of all cardinal numbers (emphasis only important for mathematicians).

Much more on the interplay between Cantor’s mathematical results on infinities and his theological writings can be found in the paper Absolute Infinity:  A Bridge Between Mathematics and Theology? by Christian Tapp.

The compassionate God of Christianity has presented theologians for centuries with the following paradox: how can a God having infinite power suffer because humans suffer?

In comes TOPology and one of its founding fathers Felix Hausdorff.



Felix Hausdorff (1868-1942) might very well be another Clancy.

He was a German mathematician who made substantial contributions to topology as well as set theory. For years he felt opposition because he was Jewish.

After the Kristallnacht in 1938 he tried to escape Nazi-Germany (DeMa) but couldn’t obtain a position in the US. On 26 January 1942, Felix Hausdorff, along with his wife and his sister-in-law, died by suicide, rather than comply with German orders to move to the Endenich camp.

He was also a philosopher and writer under the pseudonym Paul Mongré. In 1900 he wrote a book of poems, Ecstasy, of which the first poem is “Den Ungeflügelten” (To The Wingless Ones). Am I the only one to think immediately of The isle of the flightless birds?

Anyway, as to how the topology of Weilism solves the contradiction of the suffering God of Christianity is explained in the paper The Theology of Simone Weil and the Topology of Andre Weil by Ochiai Hitoshi, professor of ‘Mathematical Theology’ at Doshisha University, Kyoto.

He has a follow-up post Incarnation and Reincarnation on the Apeiron Centre (where he also has a post on the Theology of Georg Cantor). Here’s a summary of his thesis:

God is Open
Incarnation is Compactified God
The soul is Open
Reincarnation is Compactified Soul
God and the Soul are Homeomorphic
God is without Boundaries
The soul is with Boundaries
God and the Soul are not Diffeomorphic

This succinctly sums up Weilism for you.

I now understand why so many people in the 21 pilots sub-Reddit thought at the beginning of the Trench-era that Bourbaki was a group of mathematicians trying to prove the existence of God.

In the paper The Theology of Simone Weil and the Topology of Andre Weil the next quote is falsely attributed to Bourbaki

God is the Alexandroff compactification of the universe.

If you are interested in the history behind this quote you may read my post According to Groth. IV.22.

If you want an alternative explanation of Vialism, you may read my post Where’s Bourbaki’s Dema?.

Btw. I forgot to mention in that post the “Annual Assemblage of the Glorified”. Since 1918 this takes place November 11th, on Armistice Day.

In this series:

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