Bourbaki – A Secret Society of Mathematicians

The book by Mashaal and a book by Aczel (which I enjoyed) were reviewed by Michael Atiyah (1966 Fields Medalist): "Bourbaki, A Secret Society of Mathematicians" (Maurice Mashaal) and "The Artist and the Mathematician" (Amir Aczel) - Notices of the American Mathematical Society, v. 54, no. 9, October, 2007 - https://www.ams.org/notices/200709/tx070901150p.pdf

There have been numerous articles about Bourbaki, including some by former Bourbaki members:

"The Work of Bourbaki During the Last Thirty Years" - Jean Dieudonne - Notices of the American Mathematical Society, v. 29, no. 7, November, 1982 - https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/198211/198211FullIssue....

"Twenty-Five Years with Nicolas Bourbaki, 1949–1973" - Armand Borel - Notices of the American Mathematical Society, v. 45, no. 3, March, 1998 - https://www.ams.org//journals/notices/199803/borel.pdf

Edit: fixed typo

It's interesting that while Bourbaki had a large influence on modern mathematics, very few people read their books (at least among the people I know). In a sense, their project of producing a definitive exposition for a large part of mathematics has failed. I wonder whether it's because different branches of mathematics have their unique personalities, and therefore the attempt to provide a unified point of view are bound to fail.

We had our own: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=nickb

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

this is the link I posted. not sure why it got modified

https://books.google.ae/books?id=-CXn6y_1nJ8C&pg=PA18&redir_...

If you want a very deep rabbit hole to go down, look into the connections between the Bourbaki group and Twenty One Pilots lore :)

"secret society" -> "anonymous publishing group"

imagine having to rigorously prove that blood is really essential for the survival of a human being before every surgery, thanks Bourbaki. /s