Posts In Category Bourbaki
Where’s Bourbaki’s Escorial?
on February 8, 2010 by lieven in Bourbaki, Comments (0)
As explained in the bumpy-road-post, Andre Weil and Evelyne Gillet became involved sometime in 1935. Early 1936, they made a pre-honeymooning trip to Spain and visited El Escorial. Weil was so taken by the place that he planned the next Bourbaki-conference to be held in a nearby college.
However, the Bourbakis never made it to to [...]
Olivier Messiaen & Mathieu 12
on December 31, 2009 by lieven in Bourbaki, general, groups, Comments (5)
To mark the end of 2009 and 6 years of blogging, two musical compositions with a mathematical touch to them. I wish you all a better 2010!
Remember from last time that we identified Olivier Messiaen as the ‘Monsieur Modulo’ playing the musical organ at the Bourbaki wedding. This was based on the fact that his [...]
Seriously now, where was the Bourbaki wedding?
on November 25, 2009 by lieven in Bourbaki, Comments (2)
A few days before Halloween, Norbert Dufourcq (who supposedly died on december 17th 1990…), sent me a comment, filled with useful info, and hinting I did mess up big time in the previous post…
Norbert Dufourcq, an organist and student of André Marchal, the organist-in-charge at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church in 1939, the place where I speculated [...]
Where was the Bourbaki wedding?
on October 26, 2009 by lieven in Bourbaki, Comments (7)
I’m pretty certain I got the intended date & time of the Bourbaki-Pétard wedding right : June 3rd 1939 at 12h. Finding the exact location of the wedding-ceremony is an entirely different matter. And, quite probably, we are reading way too much in these pranks of the Weil-clan.
Still, it’s fun trying to find an [...]
the bumpy road to the first Bourbaki congress
on October 22, 2009 by lieven in Bourbaki, Comments (1)
Because Mandelbrojt, de Possel and Coulomb all held a position at the University Blaise Pascal of Clermont-Ferrand I assumed that the Bourbaki-group had no problem procuring the universities’ biology-outpost in Besse-en-Chandesse for their first congress in 1935. However, the relevant Bourbaki files tell a different story. As might have been expected, the project suffered from [...]
The artist and the mathematician
on October 19, 2009 by lieven in Bourbaki, books, Comments (0)
Over the week-end I read The artist and the mathematician (subtitle : The story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the genius mathematician who never existed) by Amir D. Aczel.
Whereas the central character of the book should be Bourbaki, it focusses more on two of Bourbaki’s most colorful members, André Weil and Alexander Grothendieck, and the many stories [...]
Where is the Royal Poldavian Academy?
on October 11, 2009 by lieven in Bourbaki, general, Comments (0)
Among the items found on Andre Weil at the time of his arrest was “a packet of calling cards belonging to Nicolas Bourbaki, member of the Royal Academy of Poldavia”.
But then, where is the Royal Poldavian Academy situated? Well, surely in the Kingdom of Poldavia, which is a very strange kingdom indeed, its currency unit [...]
When was the Bourbaki wedding?
on October 7, 2009 by lieven in Bourbaki, books, general, Comments (6)
It’s great fun trying to decode some of the puns contained in Betti Bourbaki’s wedding invitation. Below a photograph, taken on May 13th 1939, of three of the practical jokers (from left to right : Ralph Boas, Frank Smithies and Andre Weil), the others were Claude Chabauty, Weil’s wife Eveline and Louis Bouckaert (from Louvain).
Part [...]
The wedding invitation that nearly killed Andre Weil
on October 6, 2009 by lieven in Bourbaki, general, Comments (1)
Andre Weil wrote about his arrest as a Russian spy in november 1939 :
“The manuscripts they found appeared suspicious – like those of Sophus Lie, arrested on charges of spying in Paris, in 1870. They also found several rolls of stenotypewritten paper at the bottom of a closet. When I said these were the text of a Balzac novel, [...]
Hi, I'm a professor of mathematics at the University of Antwerp, in Belgium. My research areas are non-commutative algebra and non-commutative geometry. Sometimes, you can also find me here :
