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Category: stories

From the Noether boys to Bourbaki

Published June 2, 2012 by lievenlb

Next year I’ll be teaching a master course on the “History of Mathematics” for the first time, so I’m brainstorming a bit on how to approach such a course and I would really appreciate your input.

Rather than giving a chronological historic account of some period, I’d like this course to be practice oriented and focus on questions such as

  • what are relevant questions for historians of mathematics to ask?
  • how do they go about answering these questions?
  • having answers, how do they communicate their finds to the general public?

To make this as concrete as possible I think it is best to concentrate on a specific period which is interesting both from a mathematical as well as an historic perspective. Such as the 1930’s with the decline of the Noether boys (pictures below) and the emergence of the Bourbaki group, illustrating the shift in mathematical influence from Germany to France.

(btw. the picture above is taken from a talk by Peter Roquette on Emmy Noether, available here)

There is plenty of excellent material available online, for students to explore in search for answers to their pet project-questions :

There’s a wealth of riddles left to solve about this period, ranging from the genuine over the anecdotic to the speculative. For example

  • Many of the first generation Bourbakis spend some time studying in Germany in the late 20ties early 30ties. To what extend did these experiences influence the creation and working of the Bourbaki group?
  • Now really, did Witt discover the Leech lattice or not?
  • What if fascism would not have broken up the Noether group, would this have led to a proof of the Riemann hypothesis by the Noether-Bourbakis (Witt, Teichmuller, Chevalley, Weil) in the early 40ties?

I hope students will come up with other interesting questions, do some excellent detective work and report on their results (for example in a blogpost or a YouTube clip).

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how noncommutative geometry shot itself

Published December 31, 2011 by lievenlb

I’ve never apologized for prolonged periods of blogsilence and have no intention to start now.

But, sometimes you need to expose the things holding you back before you can turn the page and (hopefully) start afresh.

Long time readers of this blog know I’ve often warned against group-think, personality cults and the making of exaggerate claims as possible threats to the survival of noncommutative geometry (for example in the group think post).

However, I was totally unprepared for this comment left on the noncommutative geometry blog, begin October:

Noncommutative Geometry is a field whose history is unpredictable.
When should I expect the pickaxe? Yours, Leon Trotsky

After sharing this on Google+ someone emailed suggesting I’d better have a look at some ‘semi-secret’ blogs. I did spend the better part of that friday going through more than 3 years worth of blogposts and cried my eyes out.

It is sad to read a message in a bottle and notice that after more than two years the matter is still far from resolved.

I wish you all a healing and liberating 2012!

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#cestGrothendieck

Published September 30, 2011 by lievenlb

In Belgium the hashtag-craze of the moment is #cestjoelle. Joelle Milquet is perceived to be the dark force behind everything, from the crisis in Greece, over DSK, to your mother-in-law coming over this weekend? #cestjoelle.

Sam Leith used the same meme in his book the coincidence engine.

A hurricane assembling a passenger jet out of old bean-cans? #cestGrothendieck

All shops in Alabama out of Chicken & Broccoli Rica-A-Roni? #cestGrothendieck

Frogs raining down on Atlanta? #cestGrothendieck

As this is a work of fiction, Alexandre Grothendieck‘s name is only mentioned in the ‘author’s note’:

“It is customary to announce on this page that all resemblances to characters living or dead are entirely coincidental. It seems only courteous to acknowledge, though, that in preparing the character of Nicolas Banacharski I was inspired by the true-life story of the eminent mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck.”

The name ‘Nicolas Banacharski’ is, of course, chosen on purpose (the old Bourbaki NB-joke even makes an appearance). The character ‘Isla Holderness’ is, of course, Leila Schneps, the ‘Banacharski ring’ is, of course, the Grothendieck circle. But, I’d love to know the name of the IRL-‘Fred Nieman’, who’s described as ‘an operative for the military’.

Sam Leith surely knows all the Grothendieck-trivia which shouldn’t come as a surprise because he wrote in 2004 a piece for the Spectator on the ‘what is a metre?’ incident (see also this n-category cafe post).

The story of ‘the coincidence engine’ is that Grothendieck did a double (or was it triple) bluff when he dropped out of academia in protest of military money accepted by the IHES. He went into hiding only to work for a weapons company and to develop a ‘coincidence bomb’. As more and more unlikely events happen during a car-ride by a young Cambridge postdoc though the US (to propose to his American girlfriend), the true Grothendieck-aficianado (and there are still plenty of them in certain circles) will no doubt begin to believe that the old genius succeeded (once again) and that Ana’s (Grothendieck’s mother) $\infty$-ring is this devilish (pun intended) device…

However,

“There was no coincidence engine. Not in this world. It existed only in Banacharski’s imagination and in the imaginations he touched. But there was a world in which it worked, and this world was no further than a metre from our own. Its effect spilled across, like light through a lampshade.

And with that light there spilled, unappeased and peregrine, fragments of any number of versions of an old mathematician who had become his own ghost. Banacharski was neither quite alive nor quite dead, if you want the truth of it. He was a displaced person again, and nowhere was his home.”

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