Nicolas BourbakiArticle Free Pass Nicolas Bourbaki, pseudonym
chosen by eight or nine young mathematicians in France in the
mid 1930s to represent the essence of a “contemporary
mathematician.” The surname, selected in jest, was that of a
French general who fought in the Franco-German War (1870–71).
The mathematicians who collectively wrote under the Bourbaki
pseudonym at one time studied at the École Normale Supérieure in
Paris and were admirers of the German mathematician David
Hilbert. The founders included the Frenchmen Claude Chevalley,
André Weil, Henri Cartan, and Jean Dieudonné; after World War II
they were joined by the Polish American Samuel Eilenberg.
Members agreed to retire from the group at age 50, but the
group’s ranks were replenished with new recruits. The group’s
purpose was originally to write a rigorous textbook in analysis,
but it grew to include presentations of many branches of algebra
and analysis, including topology, from an axiomatic point of
view. The Bourbaki writings commenced in