Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics
quantamagazine.org
Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics
1–10 of 36 posts
Re: Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics
#2Happy to see that it's got the obligatory monk/wizard photo.
For more life and times stuff I also suggest Labatut's Cease to Understand the World book and https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/konstantinos-foutzop...
Re: Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics
#3Happy to see that it's got the obligatory monk/wizard photo. For more life and times stuff I also suggest Labatut's Cease to Understand the World book and https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/konstantinos-foutzop...
That book is fiction with a factual veneer. I liked it a lot until I started realizing that many of the details were made up. Then I couldn't read any more. It was like when TwoSetViolin described what it was like for them to watch movies with musician characters played, unrealistically, by non-musician actors. You'd be watching the perfectly fine movie until you noticed that the bananas were blue instead of yellow, with nobody mentioning it. After that the movie made no sense any more.
I hated the movie Oppenheimer for the same reason.
Re: Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics
#4Happy to see that it's got the obligatory monk/wizard photo. For more life and times stuff I also suggest Labatut's Cease to Understand the World book and https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/konstantinos-foutzop...
That book is fiction with a factual veneer. I liked it a lot until I started realizing that many of the details were made up. Then I couldn't read any more. It was like when TwoSetViolin described what it was like for them to watch movies with musician characters played, unrealistically, by non-musician actors. You'd be watching the perfectly fine movie until you noticed that the bananas were blue instead of yellow,…
> That book is fiction with a factual veneer.
Definitely, but do check the link.. I dug it up originally by trying to track down detail about the nonfiction background that the book is pulling from. Seems like the best short source, but I'd love to hear recs for a good biography. The autobiography that Groth is careful to say is not an autobiography is on my shelf and also in pdf form. Haven't read it yet, but I'm not sure it's the type of thing that's going to cover the descent into madness properly.
https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/slaoui/notes/recoltes_et_sem...
Re: Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics
#5One of my favourite Grothendieck stories from https://www.ams.org/notices/200410/fea-grothendieck-part2.pd...>:
> 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 an actual number?" Grothendieck asked. The other person replied, yes, an actual prime number. Grothendieck suggested, "All right, take 57."
Re: Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics
#6Happy to see that it's got the obligatory monk/wizard photo. For more life and times stuff I also suggest Labatut's Cease to Understand the World book and https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/konstantinos-foutzop...
That book is fiction with a factual veneer. I liked it a lot until I started realizing that many of the details were made up. Then I couldn't read any more. It was like when TwoSetViolin described what it was like for them to watch movies with musician characters played, unrealistically, by non-musician actors. You'd be watching the perfectly fine movie until you noticed that the bananas were blue instead of yellow,…
Interestingly, von Neumann's daughter was kind of shocked by the research the author did for the book The MANIAC; as a kid she carried graph paper in her pocket and Labatut had somehow found this out in his research and put it into the book, really blew her away I guess.
Re: Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
That book is fiction with a factual veneer. I liked it a lot until I started realizing that many of the details were made up. Then I couldn't read any more. It was like when TwoSetViolin described what it was like for them to watch movies with musician characters played, unrealistically, by non-musician actors. You'd be watching the perfectly fine movie until you noticed that the bananas were blue instead of yellow,…
> That book is fiction with a factual veneer. Definitely, but do check the link.. I dug it up originally by trying to track down detail about the nonfiction background that the book is pulling from. Seems like the best short source, but I'd love to hear recs for a good biography. The autobiography that Groth is careful to say is not an autobiography is on my shelf and also in pdf form. Haven't read it yet, but I'm no…
There is an incredible (alas unfinished) multipart Grothendieck biography by the German mathematician Winfried Scharlau: Wer ist Alexander Grothendieck? Anarchie, Mathematik, Spiritualität, Einsamkeit. I think an English translation exists, at least for the first and in my opinion most interesting volume: Anarchy. It mostly deals with Grothendieck’s childhood and his parents, who lived unbelievably fascinating lives as anarchists in pre-war Berlin.
Re: Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
That book is fiction with a factual veneer. I liked it a lot until I started realizing that many of the details were made up. Then I couldn't read any more. It was like when TwoSetViolin described what it was like for them to watch movies with musician characters played, unrealistically, by non-musician actors. You'd be watching the perfectly fine movie until you noticed that the bananas were blue instead of yellow,…
> That book is fiction with a factual veneer. Definitely, but do check the link.. I dug it up originally by trying to track down detail about the nonfiction background that the book is pulling from. Seems like the best short source, but I'd love to hear recs for a good biography. The autobiography that Groth is careful to say is not an autobiography is on my shelf and also in pdf form. Haven't read it yet, but I'm no…
The other article looks interesting, though it too has "blue banana" errors. Laurent Schwartz's autobiography "A Mathematician Grapples With His Century" has a more believable account of Schwartz and Dieudonné's work with Grothendieck. The Grothendieck Circle website (https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/mitanni/grothendi... since they haven't done a good job renewing domains) has a lot of Grothendieck's own writings (mostly in French) and Wilfried Scharlau's biography (in German). I tried to read those some years back but my language skills weren't up to it. Machine translation is much better now than it was then, so I might try the lazy approach.
Re: Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics
#9Happy to see that it's got the obligatory monk/wizard photo. For more life and times stuff I also suggest Labatut's Cease to Understand the World book and https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/konstantinos-foutzop...
That book is fiction with a factual veneer. I liked it a lot until I started realizing that many of the details were made up. Then I couldn't read any more. It was like when TwoSetViolin described what it was like for them to watch movies with musician characters played, unrealistically, by non-musician actors. You'd be watching the perfectly fine movie until you noticed that the bananas were blue instead of yellow,…
I read and enjoyed that book out of a general interest in the history of ideas, but admit I am not able to judge the underlying mathematics. Is the "fiction" part only related to descriptions of his mathematical contributions, or are there problems with the biographical information as well?
Re: Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics
#10One of my favourite Grothendieck stories from https://www.ams.org/notices/200410/fea-grothendieck-part2.pd... >: > 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…
I had to follow your link to get it: I hadn't realized that 57 is not prime. At least I'm in good company.