If ever a book provides a whistle-stop tour of the 20th-century's intellectual geography, Amir Aczel's The Artist and the Mathematician is the one. I was looking forward to reading it immensely. The design is enticing, it's easily portable so you can read it on the train and look brainy, and the blurb promises an intriguing tale of a pseudonymous collection of mathematicians who, over three generations, produced some of the most influential and important discoveries in mathematics, fascinating stuff, notwithstanding the revelation that these discoveries are now regarded as passé because "Bourbaki"'s work was so tied in with structuralism that when its star faded, so did his.
I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing that we are spared detailed exegeses of Bourbaki's work. Any greater detail and the lay reader would be lost, I suspect, but by adopting the same superficial approach to Jakobson's linguistics, Lévi-Strauss's anthropology, and Barthes's semiology, Aczel leaves us to take on trust that there is some intrinsic connection between them other than being lumped together in the same "school" designated "structuralism." He thus falls between two stools, offering insufficient detail for academic readers and nothing that might explain to lay readers how and why structuralism and these various thinkers acquired their significance. If I hadn't heard of the structuralists before, I'd happily leave them consigned to history on this account of their apparently uneventful lives and the absence of proof that "Bourbaki" actually was a genius; the brief biographies we receive of the protagonists hint at some fascinating stories, yet we get meagre portions. I want bigger meals!
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