One of my favourite Grothendieck stories from <<a href="https://www.ams.org/notices/200410/fea-grothendieck-part2.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.ams.org/notices/200410/fea-grothendieck-part2.pd...</a>>:<p>> 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."
If anyone's interested in Grothendieck's writing, which is primarily in French, I threw his "Séminaires de Géométrie Algébrique" (SGA, Algebraic Geometry Seminars) and "Éléments de Géométrie Algébrique" (EGA, Elements of Algebraic Geometry) into an LLM to translate it to English. It's spotty in some sections, so I intend to do another pass, but it's better than my remedial French.<p>EGA: <a href="https://github.com/jcreinhold/ega" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jcreinhold/ega</a> (<a href="https://jcreinhold.github.io/ega/" rel="nofollow">https://jcreinhold.github.io/ega/</a>)<p>SGA: <a href="https://github.com/jcreinhold/sga" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jcreinhold/sga</a> (<a href="https://jcreinhold.github.io/sga/" rel="nofollow">https://jcreinhold.github.io/sga/</a>)
For anyone interested in Grothendieck's opinions on kimchi …<p><a href="https://mikepierce.github.io/grothendieck-kimchi/translations/english/" rel="nofollow">https://mikepierce.github.io/grothendieck-kimchi/translation...</a>
all mention of aekjeot (fish sauce) and saeujeot (tiny shrimp) seems to be elided here. kimchi in coastal regions (and most commercialized korean kimchi) has a strong tendency to have that in, so if you take grothendieck's recipe as is, you won't have the exported korean taste. northern kimchis have diverged materially in addition, due to north korea being fucked up. aekjeot you can just add but the procedure to add saeujeot traditionally is pretty fiddly<p>he mentions using whatever herbs he had in a european setting like juniper and rosemary but the canonical herb to add is korean chives and dropwort. never seen juniper or rosemary, frankly.<p>he does mention that the pepper is a specific variety in korea without exception. this is the korean chili, sun-dried and flaked. it's a very distinctive varietal, the taste will be very different without it
Happy to see that it's got the obligatory monk/wizard photo.<p>For more life and times stuff I also suggest Labatut's Cease to Understand the World book and <a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/konstantinos-foutzopoulos-the-man-of-the-circular-ruins" rel="nofollow">https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/konstantinos-foutzop...</a>
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.<p>I hated the movie Oppenheimer for the same reason.
> That book is fiction with a factual veneer.<p>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 <i>not</i> 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.<p><a href="https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/slaoui/notes/recoltes_et_semailles.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/slaoui/notes/recoltes_et_sem...</a>
There is an incredible (alas unfinished) multipart Grothendieck biography by the German mathematician Winfried Scharlau: <i>Wer ist Alexander Grothendieck? Anarchie, Mathematik, Spiritualität, Einsamkeit.</i> I think an English translation exists, at least for the first and in my opinion most interesting volume: <i>Anarchy</i>. It mostly deals with Grothendieck’s childhood and his parents, who lived unbelievably fascinating lives as anarchists in pre-war Berlin.
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 (<a href="https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/mitanni/grothendieckcircle/" rel="nofollow">https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/mitanni/grothendi...</a> 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.
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?
Personally, just from the implausible level of first-person detail throughout I thought it's immediately clear the book is exceptionally well-researched but still technically qualifies as historical-fiction. We don't necessarily know what these people thought/ate/did minute by minute on the important days at that level.<p>But I think the biggest "sin" in terms of mixing fact/fiction was mostly implied and not actually stated. What's implied is that Groth saw inside mathematics some kind of terrible truth that motivated him to stop working and withdraw from the world. I don't think it's stated explicitly, but due to proximity with other topics in the book, reader is invited to conclude that there was a discovery of some kind inevitable doom, possibly a super weapon, etc.<p>We don't know that, but in a lot of ways it might be more surprising if he <i>never</i> thought along those lines. My understanding is that the other limited sources really do say he was talking to God in dreams, preoccupied with apocalyptic visions, became more interested in physics, politics, religion, the problem of evil, hostile entities ambiguously demonic, etc
Interestingly, von Neumann's daughter was kind of shocked by the research the author did for the book <i>The MANIAC</i>; 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.
I instead want to meet the guy who revolutionized 20th-Century Meth production. Prob Czech or Serb :D
Field medals are still handed out to people who deign to look upon his prophetic ramblings. I'm half-convinced the religious stuff probably unveils the geometric structure of the universe.
[dead]