ABSTRACT
By 1935, almost all of the prominent French mathematicians had studied at the École Normale, and in those days, French mathematics was dominated by the standard Cours d’Analyse, whether authored by Goursat or some other established mathematician. Those big, traditional volumes somehow did not come up to the more modern standards and objectives presented in German mathematics in Göttingen. Young French mathematicians teaching at StrasbourgWeil, Cartan, and others-knew that something better and more modern in the way of Cours d’Analyse had to be prepared, so they set out to do this in the same revolutionary spirit as their students at École Normale, and they chose “Bourbaki” as their battle cry. First published in 1939, “Bourbaki” became a sequence of informative volumes that became legendary.
