945.- Euclides-Bourbaki

Coincidencias: leo ayer un artículo en el notice de la AMS sobre Grothendieck:

It is no coincidence that the title of EGA echoes the title of the series by Nicolas Bourbaki, Éléments de Mathématique, which in turn echoes Euclid's Elements

y a la mañana había leído en el arxiv Apology of Euclid, de S. S. Kutateladze:

It is also reasonable to bear in mind that the treatise of Bourbaki is written as imitation of Euclid's Elements. The style of Bourbaki's Elements of Mathematics is exactly the style of Euclid.

Ya hemos hablado aquí (no siempre bien, 489) de Bourbaki, y agreguemos unas líneas de este trabajo que pertenecen a Salomon Bochner que describen más que bien el espíritu:

Also, if examined "objectively," Euclid's work ought to have been any educationist?s nightmare. The work presumes to begin from a beginning; that is, it presupposes a certain level of readiness, but makes no other prerequisites. Yet it never offers any "motivations," it has no illuminating "asides," it does not attempt to make anything "intuitive," and it avoids "applications" to a fault. It is so "humorless" in its mathematical purism that, although it is a book about "Elements," it nevertheless does not unbend long enough in its singlemindedness to make the remark, however incidentally, that if a rectangle has a base of 3 inches and a height of 4 inches then it has an area of 12 square inches. Euclid's work never mentions the name of a person; it never makes a statement about, or even an (intended) allusion to, genetic developments of mathematics; it makes no cross references...