Impersonation and personification in mid-twentieth century mathematics.

Michael J Barany

doi:10.1177/0073275320924571

Abstract

Pseudonymous mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki and his lesser-known counterpart E.S. Pondiczery, devised respectively in France and in Princeton in the mid-1930s, together index a pivotal moment in the history of modern mathematics, marked by international infrastructures and institutions that depended on mathematicians’ willingness to play along with mediated personifications. By pushing these norms and practices of personification to their farcical limits, Bourbaki’s and Pondiczery’s impersonators underscored the consensual social foundations of legitimate participation in a scientific community and the symmetric fictional character of both fraud and integrity in scientific authorship. To understand authorial identity and legitimacy, individual authors’ conduct and practices matter less than the collective interpersonal relations of authorial assertion and authentication that take place within disciplinary institutions.

Highlights

A life in reverseThere is a general pattern to becoming a modern mathematical author
These latter exigencies, invoked outside the matrix of principles that legitimated routine pseudonymity in publication, let the pseudonyms nucleate challenges to the institutional orders of international mathematics. One glimpses this transgressive potential in Boas and Tukey’s 1942 speculation about getting Pondiczery into the reference volume American Men of Science.[60]. The line between such a venture and articleoriented indices like Mathematical Reviews was thin but significant: both were guides to who and what mattered in the discipline, but the respective emphases on the men or the papers made the difference between earnest participation in a collective publishing enterprise and gnomic parody of indexers’ indifference to their subjects’ humanity or reality
Aware of Weil’s role in the collaboration but not of his involvement in the application, Weaver supposed that as a “responsible member of the group” Weil could broker a more reasonable approach.[73]. As it did for Tukey in his exchange with the Duke Mathematical Journal, the selective anonymity of Weil’s pseudonym-building let him maintain a reputation as a responsible broker while avoiding responsibility for potentially less-reputable impostures

Summary

Introduction

A life in reverseThere is a general pattern to becoming a modern mathematical author. Adding “I doubt that he will become another Bourbaki,” Tukey suggested Pondiczery was “much more likely to benefit mathematics than to hinder it.” Unlike Nooten’s, Pondiczery’s paper appeared later that year under the pseudonym.[52]

Results

Conclusion