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Alexander Grothendieck

theguardian.com

21–30 of 57 posts

Re: Alexander Grothendieck

#21
post #9

‘ 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…

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Re: Alexander Grothendieck

#22
“ he rarely made use of specific equations to grasp at mathematical truths, instead intuiting the broader conceptual structure around them to make them surrender their solutions all at once.”

Something 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

#23

Earlier 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)

It is rarely within reach to draw new insights from applied category theory, in particular because of the Yoneda lemma and the greater familiarity of sets and functions, and also because as algebraic objects categories have very few properties.

Re: Alexander Grothendieck

#24

Earlier 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)

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

#25
post #14

Earlier 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…

This text is a short story ("nouvelle" in French).

Re: Alexander Grothendieck

#26
post #8

Earlier 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?”

Wasn't Newton a mystic too? Yes, he was [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studie...

Re: Alexander Grothendieck

#27

Earlier 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.

Stochastic calculus is the only available tool for proving things about continuous-time stochastic processes. There aren't any alternatives, save guessing at criteria and backtesting them.

Re: Alexander Grothendieck

#28

Earlier 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

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Re: Alexander Grothendieck

#29
post #14

Earlier 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…

Fantastic! In this money driven world, he had the courage to stand up for what he believed in. Also, I seriously doubt he was considered crazy, that was the war time propaganda trying to break him down and make an example of him, so that others wouldn't stand up. It's the same thing we see today with the coercion and censorship that plaques social and old school media.

Re: Alexander Grothendieck

#30

Earlier 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

Ehh, I’m an ML scientist with a PhD in category theory and I really don’t see it going anywhere. The comparison to geometric deep learning is especially misplaced, because I think you’ll find that Bronstein’s school sets things us as a group action, etc, but then does a lot of really hard math to actually tease out properties of how information flows through a gnn. Here they just do the Applied Category Thing and say they’ve drawn a picture so QED.
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