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Oulipo's use of the Tohoku paper (2014)
Many identify the ‘Tohoku Mathematical Journal’ with just one paper published in it, affectionately called the Tohoku paper: “Sur quelques points d’algèbre homologique” by Alexander Grothendieck. In this paper, Grothendieck reshaped homological algebra for Abelian categories, extending the setting of Cartan-Eilenberg (their book and the paper both appeared in 1957).
While working on the Tohoku paper in Kansas, Grothendieck did not have access to the manuscript of the 1956 book of Cartan-Eilenberg, about which he heard from his correspondence with Serre. Perhaps he saw a methodological similarity between the introduction, by Fréchet, of abstract spaces in order to develop the foundations of functional calculus and that of the Abelian categories he needed to clarify the homological theory. Other notable members have included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior, Jean Lescure and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.
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