Skip to content →

neverendingbooks Posts

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).

Comments closed

Farey symbols in SAGE 5.0

Published May 31, 2012 by lieven

The sporadic second Janko group $J_2$ is generated by an element of order two and one of order three and hence is a quotient of the modular group $PSL_2(\mathbb{Z}) = C_2 \ast C_3$.

This Janko group has a 100-dimensional permutation representation and hence there is an index 100 subgroup $G$ of the modular group such that the fundamental domain $\mathbb{H}/G$ for the action of $G$ on the upper-half plane by Moebius transformations consists of 100 triangles in the Dedekind tessellation.

Four years ago i tried to depict this fundamental domain in the Farey symbols of sporadic groups-post using Chris Kurth’s kfarey package in Sage, but the result was rather disappointing.

Now, the kfarey-package has been greatly extended by Hartmut Monien of Bonn University and is integrated in the latest version of Sage, SAGE 5.0, released a few weeks ago.

Using the Farey symbol sage-documentation it is easy to repeat the calculations from four years ago and, this time, we do obtain this rather nice picture of the fundamental domain

But, there’s a lot more one can do with the new package. By combining the .fractions() with the .pairings() info it is now possible to get the corresponding Farey code which consists of 34 edges, starting off with



Perhaps surprisingly (?) $G$ turns out to be a genus zero modular subgroup. Naturally, i couldn’t resist drawing the fundamental domain for the 12-dimensional permutations representation of the Mathieu group $M_{12}$ and compare it with that of last time.

Comments closed