- One 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."
- For anyone interested in Grothendieck's opinions on kimchi …
https://mikepierce.github.io/grothendieck-kimchi/translation...
by jcreinhold
0 subcomment
- 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.
EGA: https://github.com/jcreinhold/ega (https://jcreinhold.github.io/ega/)
SGA: https://github.com/jcreinhold/sga (https://jcreinhold.github.io/sga/)
by williamstein
0 subcomment
- I maintain a website of scans of things Grothendieck wrote, pictures, etc. https://wstein.org/sga/
by jojomodding
0 subcomment
- Interestingly, the way in which Grothendieck conceived of equality is nowadays being questioned, especially due to the rise of formalized mathematics and Lean. More concretely, there is this fun paper by Kevin Buzzard which deconstructs it: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10387
Money quote:
> In this paper I argue that the first assertion above is false, the second is dan-
gerous, and the third is meaningless.
by ian_j_butler
1 subcomments
- Happy 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...
- Super. I always wanted to learn about sheaves and schemes and the like, and this gives a simple introduction that really motivates digging deeper into the details.
It is also immediately clear why this plays a role in semantics for logics: although a ring is not that important in logic (I would think), the idea to study a theory through its syntactical consequences turned into semantics is very natural, and exactly what I do for abstraction logic as well, in particular via "valuation spaces". And it has the same property, once you set up everything the right way, things like completeness just automatically flow out of it.
by assemblyman
0 subcomment
- Peter Woit (https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/) has occasionally posted about Grothendieck's life and work. E.g.
Articles on his life: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=7335
Two Titans (Grothendieck and Witten) - https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12868
AMS Math articles on Grothendieck - https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=78
- Not one mention of why he chose to leave those top universities.... It was because of their connection to the military industrial complex.
by SeattleAntifa
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
by stardustrosalia
0 subcomment
- 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.
Hacker News