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Category: stories

5 unfortunate French logicians

Published February 6, 2013 by lieven

According to Jean van Heijenoort, the sad state of logic in France after WW2 was largely caused by the untimely death of several key French logicians/mathematical philosophers.

Prepping for my course on the history of mathematics, starting next week, i’m trying out a couple of tools, such as Timeline JS. Below, a mini timeline of the deaths of these 5 unfortunate mathematicians.

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From the Noether boys to Bourbaki

Published June 2, 2012 by lieven

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 lieven

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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