The book introduces them as alarmingly precocious children, conversing in ancient Greek and competitively reciting verse, and, more whimsically, swearing off knee socks. A sister who died before she could solve the problem of life.” A brother who spent his long life solving problems. In her very different way, she was also a defining mind of the 20th century. To close chapter one, Olsson imagines how their story would begin in a fairy tale: “Once there were a brother and sister who devoted themselves to the search for truth. Olsson’s muses are André and his younger sister Simone Weil, a philosopher and mystic who died at 34 in 1943. In the process, she vividly portrays the human dimensions of mathematical creativity. With startling originality, Olsson confronts the problem of knowing mathematics from the outside. But the entangled motifs and motives Poldavia represents - mathematics, fiction, speculation, brilliance, biography, hardship, mockery, intimidation, solidarity, generosity, and moral and theoretical imagination - run throughout the book, making it one of the most insightful meditations on modern mathematics I have ever read. Poldavia appears only fleetingly in Karen Olsson’s genre-defying The Weil Conjectures. Shortly thereafter, Poldavia disappeared from Weil’s web profile. I shared the find with an archivist, who was not so charmed by the farce.
In town for my PhD graduation, I paid a visit to the IAS archives and came across a Weil CV that included Poldavia and Nancago. At some unknown point, Poldavia and other Bourbaki fictions (like the portmanteau city of Nancago from Bourbaki’s early post–World War II homes of Nancy, France, and Chicago, Illinois) migrated from Bourbaki’s curriculum vitae to Weil’s. Weil contributed prolifically to both Bourbaki’s mathematics and his lore, in 1948 going so far as to complete an application in Bourbaki’s name to join the American Mathematical Society. At Weil’s suggestion, they adopted a collective pseudonym, Nicolas Bourbaki, and endowed him with a backstory as a Poldavian refugee.
Poldavia’s academy came about in the next decade, when a renegade collective of French mathematicians launched a project to rewrite the foundations of modern mathematics.
It was invented by a right-wing journalist in 1929 to provoke and mock political opponents whose sympathies extended to Eastern Europeans devastated by the Great War. If you visited his faculty profile page on the IAS website any time before June 2017, you would have seen only one honor listed: “Member Poldavian Acad of Sci and Lett.”ĭon’t bother looking up Poldavia on a map or its academy in a directory of learned societies. THE INTELLECTUALLY TOWERING French mathematician André Weil, whose life spanned most of the 20th century, spent the latter half of his career as a professor at the imposing Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey.