[FOM] Who was Luc Jardie? (Juliette Kennedy)

[josef@us.es]

Dear Juliette and all,

the answer is clear. Luc Jardie is none other than Jean Cavailles, the logician-philosopher who worked in Paris during the 1930s, after studying mathematics at the Ecole Normale. Indeed he was friends with the early Bourbaki members and probably influenced them. He wrote the first history of set theory, "Remarques sur la Formation de la Theorie Abstraite des Ensembles", still a very good study of the topic. He was in contact with Hilbert, Brouwer, Emmy Noether, etc. 

Cavailles was a hero of the resistance, and as such he was buried in the Sorbonne.

Best, 
Jose Ferreiros

>  Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 film about members of the French Resistance
>  called "Army of Shadows" (L'armee des ombres) features a reclusive,
>  aristocratic philosopher named Luc Jardie. The character has written 
> 5 books:
>  "Methode Axiomatique et Formalisme," "Transfini et Continu," "Essai sur
>  le Probleme du Fondement de Mathematiques," "Sur le Logique et la Theorie
>  de la Science" and finally "Remarques sur la Formation de la Theorie
>  Abstraite des Ensembles." (Sorry I cannot supply proper accents on this
>  keyboard.)