Le Monde Grothendieck 7 May
Le Monde Grothendieck 7 May
Le Monde Grothendieck 7 May
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SCIENCE• MATHEMATICS
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Scientific treasure or old paper illegible? The
mysterious archives of Alexander Grothendieck
The 70,000 pages of this giant of mathematics sleep in a cellar in Paris. These manuscripts, written while
living as a hermit, remain to be deciphered.
By Philipp e Douroux Post ed on 06 May 2019 at 18h01 • Updated on 07 May 2019 at 20h35
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The mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck, during a conference at the Institute of Higher Scientific
Studies of Bures-sur-Yvette (Essonne), in January 1960. IHES / AFP
Is it a scientific treasure or old papers not even good for recycling, as they are
loaded with blue ink? How many hours did it take to cover 70,000 pages between
19 August 1992 and 24 August 2014, today deposited in a cellar in Paris? Mostread
The author of these lines drawn in a very fine, very flat, sometimes readable, 1 "I do not apologize, but I
understand the cracking ":
often difficult to decrypt, the mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck {1928-
the police face their own
2014) has taken extreme care to order what looks like an indecipherable message, violence
numbering each page, dating each bundle and sometimes raising its working
hours. It is to write that he had retired from the world in August 1991, in Lasserre,
an isolated village of Ariege, limiting to the minimum the contact with the men 2 Doris Day, Hollywood star of
and women he had loved so much. the 1960s , is dead
Tireless worker
3 "General " Macron still
He whose mathematics allow the exchange of phenomenal amounts of struggles to be understood
by the armies
encrypted data via tiny devices, he whose tools forged in the 1950s and 1960s
helped to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, which explains why such
particle has a mass, whose mathematical work contributed to the demonstration
of Fermat's theorem by Andrew Wiles wanted to disappear, reducing its presence
to thousands of pages.
Read also Archives of Alexander Grothendieck: what price, between
epsilon and infinity?
A tireless worker, mainly at night between 10 pm and 6 am, he had already left 28
000 pages in Montpellier, the university where he had obtained a bachelor's
degree in mathematics in 1948, and where he had returned to teach after turning
his back on the scientific community, by posing at the beginning of the 1970s the
question of the legitimacy and the finality of science. His peers had removed him
from the College de France, when the largest American universities agreed to ask
this question. He feared that technology would eventually destroy the planet,
inaugurating a radical ecology when the word did not exist yet. How could he be
wrong today, even if he assured his students that the end of the world was to
come in 1982?
What can be said about his last writings? A shipwreck of thought? A subsidence of
reason? A swallowing of intelligence? Everything is true, but it should be called
this collapse of grandiose, when Alexander Grothendieck tries to tear from
oblivion the 76,000 Jewish deportees of France, among whom was his father. He
had the most orderly mind, the chaos finally took over. He left a testimony,
sometimes poignant, of this human quest or of this misguidance, constantly
attacking the devil who had removed the pleasure of seeking.
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Facsimile of handwritten notes (1983-1984) preserved at the Montpellier Institute Alexandre
Grothendieck (IMAG) of the University of Montpellier. SUCCESSION ALEXANDRE GROTHENDIECK
These archives should have been there for only a few months, they seem to be
jammed, blocked for many years. Anyone who approaches them to put them in a
safe place seems to get discouraged quickly. They seize the file, weigh it and let go.
Because the law requires to set a price before the National Library of France (BNF)
can recover what belongs to him, according to the last wishes of the deceased.
The legislator wanted the children can not be disinherited by granting them an
inalienable part of the inheritance. It is therefore necessary to pose a small
problem of elementary arithmetic to calculate the part reserved. If the
inheritance is 100, the five children must recover 75, and 25 can go to a third, in
this case the BNF.But, of what, and 25 by how much?
An "undesirable"
We must therefore evaluate what the deceased leaves to his children, namely : a
bank account, his Ariege house and the thousands of pages of archives divided
into two funds, that of Paris and that of Montpellier, whose university has
finished to take care after ignoring it for years. The taxman is waiting and will
wait a long time to take what he wants. Any sale resulting in an income and a
contribution to the public effort.
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Facsimile of handwritten notes (1983-1984) preserved at the Montpellier Institute Alexandre
Grothendieck (IMAG) of the University of Montpellier. SUCCESSION ALEXANDRE GROTHENDIECK
Behind the barbed wire , the child discovers that there is a constant ratio between
the circumference of a circle to its diameter, before becoming one of the greatest
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mathematicians of the XX century. Even if there is no measuring instrument
to place it in front of or behind John von Neumann, the prince of applied
mathematics, Alan Turing , the man who decrypted Enigma, the secret code of
the Nazis, or John Nash, schizophrenic who will tame his illness to win the Nobel
Prize in economics with his work on game theory, he is of this dimension.
Universite de Montpel lier lnstltut Montp ellieraln Alexander Groth end leck
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Grothendieck (IMAG) of the University of Montpellier. SUCCESSION ALEXANDRE GROTHENDIECK
In France, it should be measured to the Cartan, father and son, to Andre Weil,
with whom he will play to love detestation in the manner of Sartre-le-bourgeois
and Camus-the proletarian, or Jean-Pierre Serre, elected professor at the College
de France at 29, with whom he will exchange a correspondence that looks like a
game of conceptual ping-pong . He also participated in Bourbaki, the group of
anonymous mathematicians who, after the Second World War, set out to refound
the writing of axioms, demonstrations and theorems . Recognized as one of the
best, winner of the Fields Medal in 1966, Alexandre Grothendieck was going to
get angry with those who had welcomed him with kindness. In the grip of a
feeling of dereliction , he will hate with the same force what he loved.
The seriousness of the man of science and the dirty character of the man are
summed up in a single anecdote. In July 2014, John Tate, a leader in the world of
math , seeks the address of his old friend , he wants to see "one last time, "he tells
us. The two men met in 1957, when the American mathematician spent a year in
France . He remembers being impressed by "the hospitality of the man as much as
his maths "and wants to make the trip, at 89, from Texas , where he lives, to
Lasserre. We must not warn Alexander Grothendieck , John Tate knows he does
not want to see anyone. He will come anyway. Fortunately, the children of the
111aL11e111auua11wnu nas ueen 111seuus1u111ur Lwe1ny-u1ree years are u1ere .
Alerted by a neighbor at the end of September , they came to take care of a man
with strength, who finally accepted their help. John Tate introduces himself and
asks ifhe can come in to greet his old friend. Matthew Grothendieck sends the
request to his father who finds the energy to refuse . John Tate leaves without
even seeing his friend, hermit lost in his thoughts.
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When John Tate had met him, Alexandre Grothendieck was already an assertive
researcher put on the right track by Laurent Schwartz and Jean Dieudonne, who
had welcomed him to Nancy in 1949, with a mission to understand if this young
man was a born mathematician or an "amazed howling ". This is how he describes
himself in Harvests and Sowing, a 1,000-page book in which he discusses his love
and his dislike of men , women and mathematics, from which he will move away
to "take refuge in itself" , as Alain Cannes nicely says, the only major
mathematician who defends him tirelessly .
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Becoming in 1957, the young man full of enthusiasm jostled the mathematical
community the following year at the World Congress of Mathematicians,
Edinburgh {Scotland), where he presented a program that was to take a few years
and not yet completed. It will not do the trick, but it shows the direction and
describes the steps to be taken. Others do this, with one-third of the Fields medal
recipients, a four-year award to researchers under 40, working in their wake.
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Grothendieck (IMAG) of the University of Montpellier. SUCCESSION ALEXANDRE GROTHENDIECK
So, how can we explain the weariness that wins all those who approach the
treasure of these thousands of pages and of which we do not know if it contains
gold or lead, since no one could seriously immerse himself in his writings left in
Lasserre and now stored in Paris, including the "schematic elementary geometry"
(box 1, nearly 1,100 pages), or "Psyche and structure" (boxes 2 to 4), made up ,
according to Georges Maltsiniotis, "of definitions, lemmas, propositions, theorems
and corollaries " ? His maths produced gold, but the character turned everything
into lead around him.
The BNF,to whom the mathematician has bequeathed part of his writings, sent
the director of manuscripts in Ariege. Isabelle Le Masne de Chermont says she is
touched by what she discovered in April 2015, a few months after the death of
their author in November 2014. She has delicate words to evoke "a thought
marked by suffering and self-perception. as a victim ·; bringing him closer to the
poet Antonin Artaud , "in the determination to build a vision of the world, despite
or in favor of the crossing of limit states of consciousness ".She also tried to solve
the Grothendieck archive equation without success. Her cases are poorly filled
and she does not want to hear about sums that exceed her budget. This will
preserve public money but may open the door to Yale, Harvard or Princeton, who
have other means.
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When asked the question to Emmanuel Ullmo, the head of the Institute of Higher
Scientific Studies (IHES},built in 1958 around Alexander Grothendieck, he
assures that everything was done for eighteen months and that no one among
the patrons He meets regularly to fund the IHES is willing to seriously discuss the
purchase of archives to entrust the BNF, IHES or the University of Montpellier.
" It's worthless "
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Of course, the main thing remains : to transform the "scribbles" - the word belongs
to Alexandre Grothendieck - into readable text. This is a huge job that will surely
require the expertise of a software capable of reading the writing of the hermit of
Lasserre. After , we'll know if we should talk about gold or lead. When you ask the
mathematician x, y or z in a three-dimensional space, the answer is always the
same. He breathes deeply , assures that there is probably nothing to gain from it
and immediately adds: "But it's Grothendieck, so you have to watch. "
The cost of the operation? Less than 500 000 for shelter and human mathematical
cathedral that will monitor how the brain, which created tools for ordering spaces
that escape us yet , could sink into chaos. We can also say that these writings are
undesirable. Otherwise, we must solve the operation of the inheritance and say
how much it is worth, between epsilon and infinity.
Philippe Douroux
Inthesamesection
-
How Nathaniel Rich rewrites the history of climate
In "Lose the Earth", the American writer defends the idea that the world .
almost committed the war against global warming in 1989. A historical
misinterpretation according to the blogger Sylvestre Huet.
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EDITION ABONNES
J.. JPA Yesterday
This example illustrates the absurdity of a world where one claims to give
a price to everything , where everything would be merchandise. No one
The newspaper dated May 14
can seriously say today what these archives are worth, let alone what is
their price and what they will bring to the mathematics of tomorrow.
~ ftlflo ndt ■ I
surl'qrenage
En:joote deswolences
polici!res
JOSEPH MOUTIEN 3 days ago ~
f=~.g_~:-':C!. --7"~ :.:.--
1- Remove the archives from their cellar , because we are still waiting for
the great flood of the Seine 2-Digitize the whole and put it in open
archives 3-lndemnize the right-holders for the conservation of this
national treasure.
a
like, I said you! 3 days ago > Read this edition
some maths, I only remember: how to demonstrate that , for a right > The last 30 editions (the Kiosk)
triangle , a2 + b2 = c2. the photo of the "conference" in bures on yvette
makes me laugh: less than 15 spectators-worshipers. and the diagrams
shown do not rise to the thousandth of the creations of pollock. I am a
geneticist, I have identified a gene responsible for a human genetic
disease. what did this guy do for man? not much, since it was not even
considered useful to analyze his latest productions.
An @ r 5 days ago
If you correspond with someone (a great scientist in this case), you may
not want your letters to be published in your lifetime even though the
recipient has passed away.
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Validate
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ENCHERES COURS
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J.. Bishop 6 days ago
We now expect the reaction of Mr. Vilani on the subject
The newspaper dated May 14
HB 6 days ago
There is nothing to expect from politicians in France, between their
personal ambition and their scientific ignorance. Let's bet that it will end in
the United States, where in a few decades we will understand the hidden
treasures of these writings ... and we will say in France "well thin we did
not know" ... as the shame of liquid crystals, whose physics has been
discovered in France since Friedel up to Gennes and whose Japan made
its richness in the 80s because of having filed patents!
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