‘ And there is growing academic and corporate attention to how Grothendieckian concepts could be practically applied for technological ends. Chinese telecoms giant Huawei believes his esoteric concept of the topos could be key to building the next generation of AI, and has hired Fields medal-winner Laurent Lafforgue to explore this subject. But Grothendieck’s motivations were not worldly ones, as his former colleague…
Alexander Grothendieck
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Re: Alexander Grothendieck
#22Something that caught my attention recalling Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy on the need for conceptual or apriori knowledge based proofs than empirical or derived in math.
Re: Alexander Grothendieck
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was sure this was going to be a case of spraying jargon at investors, but they've actually produced an interesting paper in this direction (in collaboration with some DeepMind people): https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15332
this paper is not good: it's easy to describe things in a categorical language (which this paper does), but not as easy to draw insights from that framework (which this paper does not do)
Re: Alexander Grothendieck
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was sure this was going to be a case of spraying jargon at investors, but they've actually produced an interesting paper in this direction (in collaboration with some DeepMind people): https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15332
this paper is not good: it's easy to describe things in a categorical language (which this paper does), but not as easy to draw insights from that framework (which this paper does not do)
Re: Alexander Grothendieck
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
agree, forgotten genius AND lonely madman, there is no contradiction.. In mathematics, and science, these people are not uncommon.
The root cause for his departure from mathematics was his categorical refusal to let the military-industrial complex invest in his research at Bures-sur-Yvette. Source: https://www.jp-petit.org/Nouvelles/Grothendieck.htm - I know the story. He was a man viscerally opposed to militarism. He once said "he'd rather be shot than wear a uniform." One day a letter arrived at IHES in Bures, where the army's scientific servi…
Re: Alexander Grothendieck
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right? It's baffling.
The title is specifically referring to a possible reassessment of his later, quasi-mystical writings, post retirement from mathematics in 1970. It’s a bit too long for the HN title submission but the actual article title in the Guardian is “ ‘He was in mystic delirium’: was this hermit mathematician a forgotten genius whose ideas could transform AI – or a lonely madman?”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studie...
Re: Alexander Grothendieck
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
this paper is not good: it's easy to describe things in a categorical language (which this paper does), but not as easy to draw insights from that framework (which this paper does not do)
Classic application of abstract math in something sexy at the time. I once saw a paper describing a trading strategy using stochastic calculus. Turns out it boiled down to buying when price went under some indicator variable, selling when above another.
Re: Alexander Grothendieck
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a joke. "Although fifty-seven is not prime, it is jokingly known as the Grothendieck prime after a legend according to which the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck supposedly gave it as an example of a particular prime number." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/57_(number)#In_mathematics
it's surrounded by 53 and 59 which is a twin with 61 then 67 but the fun part is how the same happens to these four numbers -30 so 23, 29 twin with 31 then 37 my problem is that I don't know why this would be important
Re: Alexander Grothendieck
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
agree, forgotten genius AND lonely madman, there is no contradiction.. In mathematics, and science, these people are not uncommon.
The root cause for his departure from mathematics was his categorical refusal to let the military-industrial complex invest in his research at Bures-sur-Yvette. Source: https://www.jp-petit.org/Nouvelles/Grothendieck.htm - I know the story. He was a man viscerally opposed to militarism. He once said "he'd rather be shot than wear a uniform." One day a letter arrived at IHES in Bures, where the army's scientific servi…
Re: Alexander Grothendieck
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
The folks at Symbolica are also applying topos theory, category theory, etc to AI, backed by serious folks such as Khosla and Wolfram. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vinod-khosla-betting-former-t...
I was sure this was going to be a case of spraying jargon at investors, but they've actually produced an interesting paper in this direction (in collaboration with some DeepMind people): https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15332