Bourbaki

The name Bourbaki is known to every mathematician. This book presents accounts of the origins of Bourbaki, their meetings, their seminars, and the members themselves. It also discusses the lasting influence that Bourbaki has had on mathematics, through both the Elements and the Seminaires.

Fiction. IF is a novel of ideas. You, the reader, are the nameless protagonist, a young dreamer from northern California. At the end of each chapter, you must make a pivotal decision. These choices shape your identity as the plot and literary form of the novel swerve toward twenty-two possible endings. From the margins of contemporary life to a romance in Paris and an opulent party in a Manhattan high-rise, your life is the unexpected result of the choices you make. IF explores questions of identity and freedom. What shapes a human soul? How much of life is within our control? Is it possible to have too much freedom?

This is an English translation of Bourbaki’s Fonctions d'une Variable Réelle. Coverage includes: functions allowed to take values in topological vector spaces, asymptotic expansions are treated on a filtered set equipped with a comparison scale, theorems on the dependence on parameters of differential equations are directly applicable to the study of flows of vector fields on differential manifolds, etc.

Each volume of Nicolas Bourbakis well-known work, The Elements of Mathematics, contains a section or chapter devoted to the history of the subject. This book collects together those historical segments with an emphasis on the emergence, development, and interaction of the leading ideas of the mathematical theories presented in the Elements. In particular, the book provides a highly readable account of the evolution of algebra, geometry, infinitesimal calculus, and of the concepts of number and structure, from the Babylonian era through to the 20th century.

Integration is the sixth and last of the books that form the core of the Bourbaki series; it draws abundantly on the preceding five Books, especially General Topology and Topological Vector Spaces, making it a culmination of the core six. The power of the tool thus fashioned is strikingly displayed in Chapter II of the author's Théories Spectrales, an exposition, in a mere 38 pages, of abstract harmonic analysis and the structure of locally compact abelian groups. The first volume of the English translation comprises Chapters 1-6; the present volume completes the translation with the remaining Chapters 7-9. Chapters 1-5 received very substantial revisions in a second edition, including changes to some fundamental definitions. Chapters 6-8 are based on the first editions of Chapters 1-5. The English edition has given the author the opportunity to correct misprints, update references, clarify the concordance of Chapter 6 with the second editions of Chapters 1-5, and revise the definition of a key concept in Chapter 6 (measurable equivalence relations).

This is a softcover reprint of the 1987 English translation of the second edition of Bourbaki's Espaces Vectoriels Topologiques. Much of the material has been rearranged, rewritten, or replaced by a more up-to-date exposition, and a good deal of new material has been incorporated in this book, reflecting decades of progress in the field.