the group began to write an enormous treatise, more and more fanatical in style, meant to set the discipline straight. Logical analysis was central. A mathematician had to begin with solid first principles and deduce all the rest from them. The group stressed the primacy of mathematics among sciences, and also insisted upon a detachment from other sciences. Mathematics was mathematics—it could not be valued in terms of its application to real physical phenomena. And above all, Bourbaki rejected the use of pictures. A mathematician could always be fooled by his visual apparatus. Geometry was
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