Alexandre Grothendieck turns 80 in self-imposed isolation
May 14th 2008 06:40
Category: Eclectic
Grothendieck was a highly celebrated abstract mathematician, dealing with the relationships between objects:
"His abstractions brought concrete results. For example, Grothendieck, together with his student Pierre Deligne and others, proved the Weil conjectures, profound theorems in algebraic geometry."
Unfortunately, when he got older, his obsession with politics drove him to flee society, a society that had, once before, imprisoned him and his parents, with his father dying in Auschwitz.
He was disgusted at the idea that an academic institute should take money from the military, a truth that, unfortunately, seems to be everlasting... a surprising amount of groundbreaking work actually comes out of funding from the US military.
He tried to start a commune, tried to replace his math talks with talks about the war in Vietnam.
In the 90s, he fled into the French mountains, losing contact with his colleagues and turning his back on the mathematics that had fuelled his life.
"She hesitates to call him crazy, though she admits that in a technical sense, that might be true. “His mental state is very, very special.”"
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