The Bourgain Project
Jean Bourgain was one of the greatest problem solvers of his time, producing some of the deepest and most far-reaching results. Here, we will expand and digest his ideas, with the goal of trying to better understand the impact and recurring themes in his work.
Objectives of the Bourgain project
- To understand all of Bourgain’s work completely, and to present it in a way that any working mathematician can follow.
- To figure out better ways of presenting mathematics than the standard PDF format alone.
- To present ideas on how to give more engaging talks, using video presentations or animations of Bourgain’s work.
- To find recurring patterns and tools in Bourgain’s work, and to map out the breadth of the fields he worked in and the connections between them.
- To understand the impact of his work on other mathematicians.
- To build a community, by giving mathematicians the opportunity to team up, to digest some of the most influential papers in their field, and to be creative about how mathematics may be presented in the future.
- To encourage mathematicians to think about other projects (related or unrelated to this one) and to build new venues that the community can contribute to.
This project complements the Paper of the Future and the new journal Mathematical Discourse, and is meant to be a community project.
Subjects and number of papers
Organization of the website
All articles contains the complete bibliography of Bourgain, sorted in various ways. Each entry carries its full reference, its citation count, and a link to access the paper.
Digested articles collects the data associated with the new, digested papers, possibly including links to videos, lectures, formalizations, animations and repositories. Including a separate summary of the paper and a brief note on its wider impact or personal meaning is also encouraged.
Bourgain's toolkit discusses the large scale patterns and recurring ideas in Bourgain's works. The exact format of how to present this is still unclear and we welcome input from the community.
Bourgain's collaborators lists everyone who wrote a paper with Bourgain, organized in various ways.
Impact of Bourgain's work displays the incredible breadth and novelty of Bourgain's work. It includes a citation tree and an open discussion on the influence Bourgain has had on mathematics.
Links gathers talks, conferences, prizes, articles and other material about Bourgain and his work.
About explains the goals of the project, how to contact the maintainers, and basic policies that we expect contributors to follow.
Contribute explains how one may submit a digestion or find a team to work with.