Leo Corry discussed this in his book on Structures and on page 335 of his paper
@BOOK{CorryMA2004,
AUTHOR = "Corry, Leo",
TITLE = "Modern Algebra and the Rise of Mathematical Structures",
PUBLISHER = "Birkh{\"a}user",
YEAR = "2004",
}
@ARTICLE{CorryBourbaki,
AUTHOR = "Corry, Leo",
TITLE = "Nicolas {B}ourbaki and the Concept of Mathematical Structure",
JOURNAL = "Synthese",
YEAR = "1992",
volume = "92",
number = "3",
pages = "315--48",
}
Corry describes how Saunders Mac Lane reviewed Pierre Samuel's paper and corrected a mistake in it
> Pierre Samuel, "On universal mappings and free topological groups", Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 54, juin 1948, p. 591-598.
Saunders's review is MR0025152. Saunders did not name any of his own related work. He did say "This treatment is similar to that previously given by Kakutani [Proc. Imp. Acad. Tokyo 20, 595–598 (1944); MR0014093].
Colin
was a big influence on this section (and note that P. Samuel was also a Bourbaki collaborator).
The following 1950 draft does not have the cited result:
The April 1953 draft has a corresponding heading, but the pages are missing.
David
You can see the publication history of Chapter 4 of Théorie des Ensembles here:
http://archives-bourbaki.ahp-numerique.fr/elements-mathematique#elements-math1
If people have access to older copies they might check the 1957 and 1966 editions of the standalone ch4, and the 1970 edition of the full book. More patient people m8ght like to dig through the drafts at
Eilenberg was active in Bourbaki, don't forget, and was writing drafts on category theory. I can't recall when he ceased working with them offhand.
David
CAUTION: External email. Only click on links or open attachments from trusted senders.
This reminds me of a (probably trivial) question that occurred to me some time ago. N. Bourbaki's Theory of Sets has a result very similar to the general adjoint functor theorem (CST22 in Chapter IV, 3.2). This volume was printed about 4 years
after Abelian Categories.
Is the history behind the Bourbaki's version known?
Thank you,
Nikita.
Peter has called my attention to the existence of some historical notes in the preface to the TAC reprint (TR-3) of Abelian categories. In particular, he had already essentially discovered the general adjoint functor, at least for reflective subcategories)
in his undergrad honors thesis, even though adjoints had not yet been defined. The preface in the TAC reprint includes things not in any other published version of the book.
Michael