“A Young Man’s Game”: Youth, gender, play, and power in the personae of mid-twentieth-century global mathematics

The mathematical profession’s vast global transformations in the middle decades of the twentieth century coincided with significant changes to the people who constituted the international mathematical community, the social norms and modes through which they interacted, and the kinds of knowledge they produced and shared. This chapter interrogates G. H. Hardy’s famous 1940 observation that “mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game”, historicizing norms of youth, gender, and play and then examining how their importance changed through the lens of the pseudonymous persona of Nicolas Bourbaki and the collective personae of the mathematicians who wrote under Bourbaki’s name.