Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Alexander Grothendieck has died

liberation.fr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 59 posts

Re: Alexander Grothendieck has died

#41

Post by PavlovsCat »

_almosnow wrote: post #15
michael_nielsen wrote: post #9

Grothendieck's comments on creativity have been very important in my life, especially the following quote (in translation from the French): "To state it in slightly different terms: in those critical years [roughly from age 17 to 20] I learned how to be alone." "This formulation doesn't really capture my meaning. I didn't, in any literal sense learn to be alone, for the simple reason that this knowledge had never bee…

I actually became aware of Grothendieck's existence because of his isolation and will to be forgotten from this world (including his plead to have his work removed). I will never know the true reason behind his behavior but I'm a scientist myself (life sciences) and at some point of my life I started to hate the field and actually wanting to become isolated and not sharing the tiniest bit of my work with my peers. Pe…

I was just reminded of something I read in the exchange between Einstein and Born; I tried to figure out how to quote it all without loosing context or making a mess, but failed. It's at http://archive.org/stream/TheBornEinsteinLetters/Born-TheBor... , search for "I enclose the text of my letter to the Reporter". Which in turn, now reminds me of Bob Dylan's "Masters of War":

    You’ve thrown the worst fear
    That can ever be hurled
    Fear to bring children
    Into the world
Which maybe isn't even that much of a stretch. It stinks that things that should be purely a celebration, namely to bring new life or new knowledge into the world, are not as clear cut, but I'd never blame the people who are having such second thoughts. If we can't create and sustain an environment where thought can flow and grow freely, then we shouldn't be surprised when we reap mostly commercial mediocrity.

Re: Alexander Grothendieck has died

#42

Post by another_user »

neworder wrote: post #14

There is a fundraising effort to fund the translation of Grothendieck's biography, written by Winfried Scharlau: http://www.gofundme.com/7ldiwo I've read the 1st volume of the biography and fully recommend it, so if you find AG's life interesting, you can consider donating a few bucks.

Are there any fundraising efforts on recoltes et semalles?

Re: Alexander Grothendieck has died

#43

Post by 205guy »

I am both surprised as how successful he was at remaining obscure, and yet how many on HN were familiar with his work and writings.

I was briefly a math major at the university, I studied at a technical school in France, I read a lot on technical forums such as HN where some people seem to know his work, like many I am fascinated by geniuses and their eccentricities, I browse Wikipedia for fun, and yet I was totally unaware of his life and work. Maybe I'd heard his name in passing, but no mention of his talent or writings, or his eccentric life because then I would've remembered his name.

I find it sad that he is so obscure, though I see that it was his wish. On the one hand, you want to respect someone who obviously had his own reasons for withdrawal, on the other it seems like a madman's wish to be erased from the history books and even from the annals of science. That's not how science works, and that he thought he could be the exception shows a disjunction. I don't want to imply it was a mental illness, but I'd like to read more to try to understand his state of mind. Now that he lived and died in (relative) obscurity, it won't hurt to learn about him and learn from him.

Re: Alexander Grothendieck has died

#45

Post by Bahamut »

205guy wrote: post #43

I am both surprised as how successful he was at remaining obscure, and yet how many on HN were familiar with his work and writings. I was briefly a math major at the university, I studied at a technical school in France, I read a lot on technical forums such as HN where some people seem to know his work, like many I am fascinated by geniuses and their eccentricities, I browse Wikipedia for fun, and yet I was totally…

In mathematics, he is far from obscure though. His name is all over algebraic geometry. Any graduate student who has taken an algebraic geometry class would absolutely know of him, and most should have heard of his name from various algebra or topology courses.

Re: Alexander Grothendieck has died

#46

Post by [deleted] »

michael_nielsen wrote: post #9

Grothendieck's comments on creativity have been very important in my life, especially the following quote (in translation from the French): "To state it in slightly different terms: in those critical years [roughly from age 17 to 20] I learned how to be alone." "This formulation doesn't really capture my meaning. I didn't, in any literal sense learn to be alone, for the simple reason that this knowledge had never bee…

[deleted]

Re: Alexander Grothendieck has died

#47

Post by fermigier »

thebear wrote: post #18

I believe that Grothendieck always insisted on spelling his first name "Alexander" rather than the French "Alexandre." If this is true, as I believe it is, let's make an effort to respect his wish.

Interestingly, it seems that on what might be the last autographed document publicly available from him, he signed "Alexandre" and not "Alexander":

https://ztfnews.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/grothendiecks-de...

Re: Alexander Grothendieck has died

#48

Post by wires »

Igglyboo wrote: post #22
davmre wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those unfamiliar with the reference (from http://www.ams.org/notices/200410/fea-grothendieck-part2.pdf ): One striking characteristic of Grothendieck’s mode of thinking is that it seemed to rely so little on examples. This can be seen in the legend of the so-called “Grothendieck prime”. In a mathematical conversation, someone suggested to Grothendieck that they should consider a particular prime number. “You mean…

I'm not sure I understand what Mumford is alluding to, care to explain?

His style of thinking seems very categorical, where one does not focus on structure of the objects in question (say prime numbers), rather on the mappings between/from/to them. In fact, from the cat. perspective you need to put extra effort to point out particular objects in your collection (http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/generalized+element).

Grothendieck certainly knew what it means for p to be prime. I don't know, but maybe his thoughts went along the line of "primes are some substructure of the natural numbers and such and such changes happen in the functions that we can build on them".

So he was obviously able to speak about some collection of primes, yet whether an actual number is prime he probably doesn't think much about.

Re: Alexander Grothendieck has died

#49

Post by barbudorojo »

I wonder if there is some hidden factor in the minds of those mathematicians that allows them to think so easily in abstract terms. I have always needed to begin with simple examples and from them to go to generalities. Perhaps they learned all the easy stuff when they were children and all those years of their adolescence were employed to enrich their minds with more and more general and powerful concepts and frameworks. Then, when they mature they no longer needs to think about the concrete, for then those abstracts ideas are as concrete like a tree for a child.

That vision is only achievable for those able to live alone, to wander with their thoughts, to lose themselves in the island of their inner world. Their inner world and ideas are more real and concrete than what we see with our eyes. They don't see a prime number, a prime ideal is only point in the spectrum of a ring, their math ideas are so colorful that nobody can reach that peak without forgetting where we come from and that the earth is our planet. They live in a different math heaven always climbing to reach the book (Erdos ideal).

Re: Alexander Grothendieck has died

#50

Post by NotOscarWilde »

joaorico wrote: post #11

Here's one of his staggering quotes [1], worth reading through: "In those critical years I learned how to be alone. [But even] this formulation doesn't really capture my meaning. I didn't, in any literal sense learn to be alone, for the simple reason that this knowledge had never been unlearned during my childhood. It is a basic capacity in all of us from the day of our birth. However these three years of work in iso…

> [1] Quote translation found in [2] from Alexander Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles, 1986, English translation by Roy Lisker, www.grothendieck-circle.org, chapter 2.

Did Roy Lisker translate the book in its entirety or just partially? I know you might argue it's a bad question but I have no clue whether it is hard to find a translation because of Grothendieck's wishes or because there is none yet.

Post reply on HN