The Artist and the Mathematician: The Story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the Genius Mathematician Who Never Existed

Abstract

T he one hundredth birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founding father of structural anthropology and a member of the Académie Française, was celebrated with pomp in Paris on November 28, 2008. For reasons of health, Lévi-Strauss did not participate in the main ceremonies held at the ethnographical museum of Quai Branly, but President Sarkozy paid a courtesy visit to his home. Math and myth intertwine in a subtle manner in the thought of Lévi-Strauss. Mathematical tropes carry a heavy burden in his texts. They are more than metaphors. Structures of mathematics serve to express some of his most fundamental ideas about human societies. Mathematics may have played a bigger part in the genesis of structuralism than has generally been realized. I review two books that shed light on this interaction. The volume edited by Pierre Maranda is a technical and philosophical contribution to the more sophisticated aspects of Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual legacy, whereas Amir D. Aczel’s popular book on Bourbaki has been included because of the large place given to Lévi-Strauss in it. Lévi-Strauss is a bricoleur who during his extraordinarily long career has made use of the most diverse intellectual tools that happened to be available to him. After conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil in 1935 through 1939, he became a foremost theoretician systematizing the mythologies of the world. In 1939, he returned to France to take part in the war effort. After the French capitulation, he was forced to flee – being of Jewish ancestry – to the United States. New York’s Greenwich Village became an intellectual hub where many European émigrés came together. Along with Jacques Maritain, Henri Focillon, and Roman Jakobson, he was a founding member of the École Libre des Hautes Études, a sort of university-in-exile for French academics. He was much influenced by the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson. His basic notion of mythème, an irreducible kernel of a myth, can be traced back to the Saussurean concept of phonème. Lévi-Strauss was inspired by structures of music as well. His major work Mythologiques compares in its four-fold structure with the tetralogy of Richard Wagner. It is less known – and not always well-understood – that mathematics played a certain role in the unfolding of structuralism as an intellectual movement, to the point – as is vigorously claimed by Aczel – that we should count the mathematician André Weil as one of its founding fathers. Lévi-Strauss rubbed shoulders with Weil in New York and helped to organize a temporary position for him at the University of São Paulo. Weil stayed in the United States whereas Lévi-Strauss returned to France and defended a thesis on elementary kinship structures at the Sorbonne in 1949.