In 1931, d kosambi, Goa-born mathematician-historian who later did valuable work in numismatics and wrote the classic The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline (1965), published a paper in the Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences of the Provinces of Agra and Oudh, Allahabad. It was titled “On a Generalisation of the Second Theorem of Bourbaki”, and was intentionally nonsensical. Kosambi referred to “the little-known Russian mathematician, D Bourbaki, who had been poisoned during the Revolution”.

Not only was there no such Second Theorem, there was no such mathematician. There had been a much decorated French general called Bourbaki in the 18th century, who even had a street named after him in Paris. In 1927, a mathematics student at the Ecole Normale Superieure invoked a “Theorem of Bourbaki” in a ritualised annual prank. Among the students present then was Andre Weil, who later played an integral role in the formulation of the “new math” that changed the discipline after the War, imbuing it with rigour and structure.

Weil, an ardent student of Sanskrit and the Bhagavad Gita, had found a teaching position at Aligarh Muslim University in 1929. At the age of 23, he was given the responsibility to revitalise the mathematics department. Among the teachers he brought in was Kosambi, who’d studied at Harvard and whom he’d met in Benares. Weil told Kosambi about the Paris prank, and planted the idea for another one in his mind.

Bourbaki survived the spoof. On December 10, 1934, he was resurrected by Weil (fourth from left in the photograph above) and a group of bright young mathematicians as Nicolas Bourbaki. The six of them were early in their teaching careers in universities around France, and they gathered at a café in Paris’s Latin Quarter to write the curriculum for calculus and mathematical analysis. They decided to collectively write under the name, Nicolas Bourbaki. Members would join and exit Bourbaki, but over the next forty or so, years the group would play a decisive role in shaping mathematics.

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