Jean Dieudonne

Posted on August 11, 2005 by woit

Pierre Cartier has written a short biographical article about the remarkable French mathematician Jean Dieudonné. Cartier estimates that Dieudonné wrote about 80,000 pages of mathematics over the course of his career. He was a driving force behind Bourbaki, often taking on the bulk of the writing tasks. With Alexandre Grothendieck he co-wrote EGA, the huge foundational text on algebraic geometry (some people note that, considering the French meaning of his name, this text could be described as “God-given”).

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2 Responses to Jean Dieudonne

  1. D R Lunsford says:
    August 12, 2005 at 12:29 am

    I was told in such a way as to believe it, that one of those “new math” Bourbaki tomes boasted about the lack of diagrams and heuristics to be found within – as if to say, knowledge must be gained in some exquisite way in order for it to have value. This is the heart of the string debacle. Academics have become exquisites.

    -drl

  2. Alejandro Rivero says:
    August 12, 2005 at 5:20 am

    Yep, Bourbaki in some introduction boasts a bit about this, ie about not using didactics as a substitute of proofs. It aims, as Streater/Wightman, for precision.

    I can not think about any string book similar in style (nor precision) to the ones of Bourbaki, so perhaps it is a bad comparison.

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