Do Not Adjust Your Set. From Central Services and the
continuing online saga, "Nick and Nora Investigate
Hydrinos"...
...overheard on another newsgroup, which doesn't
appreciate geek humor ... and with homage to G�del and
the discovery of a severe limitation on what one can
sensibly seek from a logical system... rediscovered
every time I look into the mirror... and with homage
to another Baron, the one for which my favorite
pathology is named, to wit: "Munchausen's Syndrome by
Proxy" which is said (no kidding - in Medical
Literature) to be a form of dissociative psychological
disorder known generically as a "factitious" disorder.
The "by proxy" part, not to mention the factitious
part, does Terry Gilliam even prouder, demonstrating
once again that ductwork is more than a metaphor for
our future limitations, and that science is
intrinsically more humorous than Yiddish spoken with
an Irish accent.
CAVEAT: the following suffers from severe "factitious"
disorder.
-----------------------------------------------------
On Professor Nicholas Bourbaki
In 1974, I and my then Fianc�e, Jim Harris, spent a
semester at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris
(then as now the prime source of mathematicians in
France). At the time, the renowned French genius
Nicholas (Nikki) Bourbaki was lecturing on Bayesian
Statistics. I sat in for his course, and attended some
social gatherings where he was honored. Eventually I
became his "niece", to the distress of Jim, who by
then wasn't in his prime and had lost his continuity
function and rigid body dynamics.
The following are my personal remembrances of the
great professor. Let others calculate their own
expressions, if they don't agree - the mathematician's
life is complex: it has both real and imaginary
components.
Professor Bourbaki, in his university persona, was
becoming a narrow-minded pedagogue who had grown
tyrannical over the years with his power in the
classroom. He often told students "What I do not cover
in my lectures, I will cover on the final exam."
Whenever he met a professor from another department to
discusses a student who had transferred out of the
math department, he would say "good, this raises the
level of average ability in both departments."
A colleague once made the mistake of submitting a
paper to N.B for review. Bourbaki replied to his call
"I am sitting in the smallest room in my house with
your paper. Soon I shall have it behind me, and filled
with more meaning." I was once at a cocktail party
with him. When the dean's wife asked him if he could
explain the idea of infinity to her, he replied, "I
once tried to give a lecture on the subject to other
mathematicians, but after about 15 minutes I stopped
because I realized that a proper treatment of the
subject would take forever."
Bourbaki's personality was so negative in a social
setting that whenever he walked into a party, guests
would turn to each other and ask who had just left.
When another mathematician asked him why he had both a
wife and mistress he answered: "It's best to have both
so that when the wife thinks you're with the mistress
and the mistress thinks you're with your wife - you
can do some mathematics."
But you shouldn't think that statisticians like myself
aren't mean lovers. We do it discretely and
continuously and deviation is considered normal. We
can safely comment on posterior distributions, and
even if we may not be normal, we are transformable.
I know this must sound like I'm making this up, but I
swear I'm not: the good professor may have been a bit
acute, and would go off on tangents, but he was a fine
mathematician and taught me everything I know about
"la loi d`emmerdement maximum".
Nora
... with apologies to Michael Stueben
-----------------------------------------------------
In truth, the "Bourbaki" group of singularly
uninteresting scholars was named in honor of a student
prank, which is even more boring to recount than the
lifetime achievements of the group. More seriously,
the rationale for using a collective surname for their
work was that they felt mathematics should be
abstracted away from individual personalities, and
also they strove for meticulous, airtight proofs and
excruciatingly correct formalism - a byproduct of the
insular French educational system, which insists on
punctilious proofs, starting as far back in
kindergarten. This is done mostly as a substitute for
lack of imagination and initiative, and in preparation
for life in the French bureaucracy. Is it any wonder
why there were once so many French collaborators, not
to mention artists and whores.
�Nicholas Bourbaki,� the group's joint-persona, prior
to the truth coming-out, was described as a shy,
reticent mathematician, but was broadly hailed by
those in the cabal as a true "genius," in the steps of
Poincare, Fourier, Pascal, Cartan, Fermat, etc. The
public eventually learned that Bourbaki was a
pseudonym for a collective of average mathematicians
with different (yawn) specialties of no particular
merit, but passive/aggressive egos rivaling Baron
Munchausen�s.
While any clever collective name starting with the
letters "N.B" is considered "in" and �hip� among
undergrads and perhaps a few overgrads and
overly-secretive pundits, as a fitting moniker to
describe a loose collective of passive/aggressive
genius egos, it is perhaps just a coincidence that the
only group using such a pseudonym, which has yet made
a real impact on advancing the cutting-edge of
anything creative, strives to provide improvisational
music which builds to a sound that, according to their
own unbiased apraisal, "is more than the sum of its
original parts." They wanted to use the name "Synergy"
but it was already taken. "Bootstrapping" was also
considered but was thought too circular. At least they
got the tagline right "No solo, no ego, all sound and
no bite" ...
Signed,
Harry Tutttle, renegade plumber and ductwork engineer
