ABSTRACT
The work method used in Bourbaki is a terribly long and painful one, but is almost imposed by the project itself. Certain foreigners, invited as spectators to Bourbaki meetings, always come out with the impression that it is a gathering of madmen. The second step is Bourbaki’s aim: to gather from the diverse processes used by mathematicians whatever can be shaped into a coherent theory, logically arranged, easily set forth and easily used. The theory of ordinals and cardinals, universal algebra, lattices, non-associative algebra, most general topology, most of topological vector spaces, most of group theory, most of number theory. The processes of summation and everything that can be called hard analysis—trigonometrical series, interpolation, series of polynomials, etc.; there are many things here; and finally, of course, all applied mathematics.
