I just read Amir Aczel's book on Bourbakis, The Artist and the Mathematician: The Story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the Genius Mathematician Who Never Existed. In my opinion, the book was terribly written, but it did bring up a number of interesting topics. Chief among them was structuralism, which is a philosphy based upon the idea that there are symmetries and patterns inherent to each branch of knowledge. For example, linguists were able to decode the inherent structures in language by sorting ... Read this and 1 comment.