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Tag: bourbaki

The empty set according to bourbaki

Published February 9, 2013 by lievenlb

The footnote on page E. II.6 in Bourbaki’s 1970 edition of “Theorie des ensembles” reads




If this is completely obvious to you, stop reading now and start getting a life. For the rest of us, it took me quite some time before i was able to parse this formula, and when i finally did, it only added to my initial confusion.

Though the Bourbakis had a very preliminary version of their set-theory already out in 1939 (Fascicule des Resultats), the version as we know it now was published, chapter-wise, in the fifties: Chapters I and II in 1954, Chapter III in 1956 and finally Chapter IV in 1957.


In the first chapter they develop their version of logic, using ‘assemblages’ (assemblies) which are words of signs and letters, the signs being $\tau, \square, \vee, \neg, =, \in$ and $\supset$.

Of these, we have the familiar signs $\vee$ (or), $\neg$ (not), $=$ (equal to) and $\in$ (element of) and, three more exotic ones: $\tau$ (their symbol for the Hilbert operator $\varepsilon$), $\square$ a sort of wildcard variable bound by an occurrence of $\tau$ (the ‘links’ in the above scan) and $\supset$ for an ordered couple.

The connectives are written in front of the symbols they connect rather than between them, avoiding brackets, so far example $(x \in y) \vee (x=x)$ becomes $\vee \epsilon x y = x x$.

If $R$ is some assembly and $x$ a letter occurring in $R$, then the intende meaning of the *Hilbert-operator* $\tau_x(R)$ is ‘some $x$ for which $R$ is true if such a thing exists’. $\tau_x(R)$ is again an assembly constructed in three steps: (a) form the assembly $\tau R$, (b) link the starting $\tau$ to all occurrences of $x$ in $R$ and (c) replace those occurrences of $x$ by an occurrence of $\square$.

For MathJax reasons we will not try to draw links but rather give a linked $\tau$ and $\square$ the same subscript. So, for example, the claimed assembly for $\emptyset$ above reads

$\tau_y \neg \neg \neg \in \tau_x \neg \neg \in \square_x \square_y \square_y$

If $A$ and $B$ are assemblies and $x$ a letter occurring in $B$ then we denote by $(A | x)B$ the assembly obtained by replacing each occurrence of $x$ in $B$ by the assembly $A$. The upshot of this is that we can now write quantifiers as assemblies:

$(\exists x) R$ is the assembly $(\tau_x(R) | x)R$ and as $(\forall x) R$ is $\neg (\exists x) \neg R$ it becomes $\neg (\tau_x(\neg R) | x) \neg R$

Okay, let’s try to convert Bourbaki’s definition of the emptyset $\emptyset$ as ‘something that contains no element’, or formally $\tau_y((\forall x)(x \notin y))$, into an assembly.

– by definition of $\forall$ it becomes $\tau_y(\neg (\exists x)(\neg (x \notin y)))$
– write $\neg ( x \notin y)$ as the assembly $R= \neg \neg \in x \square_y$
– then by definition of $\exists$ we have to assemble $\tau_y \neg (\tau_x(R) | x) R$
– by construction $\tau_x(R) = \tau_x \neg \neg \in \square_x \square_y$
– using the description of $(A|x)B$ we finally indeed obtain $\tau_y \neg \neg \neg \in \tau_x \neg \neg \in \square_x \square_y \square_y$

But, can someone please explain what’s wrong with $\tau_y \neg \in \tau_x \in \square_x \square_y \square_y$ which is the assembly corresponding to $\tau_y(\neg (\exists x) (x \in y))$ which could equally well have been taken as defining the empty set and has a shorter assembly (length 8 and 3 links, compared to the one given of length 12 with 3 links).

Hair-splitting as this is, it will have dramatic implications when we will try to assemble Bourbaki’s definition of “1” another time.

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From the Noether boys to Bourbaki

Published June 2, 2012 by lievenlb

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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#cestGrothendieck

Published September 30, 2011 by lievenlb

In Belgium the hashtag-craze of the moment is #cestjoelle. Joelle Milquet is perceived to be the dark force behind everything, from the crisis in Greece, over DSK, to your mother-in-law coming over this weekend? #cestjoelle.

Sam Leith used the same meme in his book the coincidence engine.

A hurricane assembling a passenger jet out of old bean-cans? #cestGrothendieck

All shops in Alabama out of Chicken & Broccoli Rica-A-Roni? #cestGrothendieck

Frogs raining down on Atlanta? #cestGrothendieck

As this is a work of fiction, Alexandre Grothendieck‘s name is only mentioned in the ‘author’s note’:

“It is customary to announce on this page that all resemblances to characters living or dead are entirely coincidental. It seems only courteous to acknowledge, though, that in preparing the character of Nicolas Banacharski I was inspired by the true-life story of the eminent mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck.”

The name ‘Nicolas Banacharski’ is, of course, chosen on purpose (the old Bourbaki NB-joke even makes an appearance). The character ‘Isla Holderness’ is, of course, Leila Schneps, the ‘Banacharski ring’ is, of course, the Grothendieck circle. But, I’d love to know the name of the IRL-‘Fred Nieman’, who’s described as ‘an operative for the military’.

Sam Leith surely knows all the Grothendieck-trivia which shouldn’t come as a surprise because he wrote in 2004 a piece for the Spectator on the ‘what is a metre?’ incident (see also this n-category cafe post).

The story of ‘the coincidence engine’ is that Grothendieck did a double (or was it triple) bluff when he dropped out of academia in protest of military money accepted by the IHES. He went into hiding only to work for a weapons company and to develop a ‘coincidence bomb’. As more and more unlikely events happen during a car-ride by a young Cambridge postdoc though the US (to propose to his American girlfriend), the true Grothendieck-aficianado (and there are still plenty of them in certain circles) will no doubt begin to believe that the old genius succeeded (once again) and that Ana’s (Grothendieck’s mother) $\infty$-ring is this devilish (pun intended) device…

However,

“There was no coincidence engine. Not in this world. It existed only in Banacharski’s imagination and in the imaginations he touched. But there was a world in which it worked, and this world was no further than a metre from our own. Its effect spilled across, like light through a lampshade.

And with that light there spilled, unappeased and peregrine, fragments of any number of versions of an old mathematician who had become his own ghost. Banacharski was neither quite alive nor quite dead, if you want the truth of it. He was a displaced person again, and nowhere was his home.”

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