The Guardian profiles Alexander Grothenieck (1928-2014). Article title: “He was in mystic delirium – was this hermit mathematician a forgotten genius whose ideas cound transform AI – or a lonely madman?” Byline: “In isolation, Alexander Grothendieck seemed to have lost touch with reality, but some say his metaphysical theories could contain wonders.”
“Born in 1928, he arrived in France from Germany as a refugee in 1939, and went on to revolutionise postwar mathematics as Einstein had physics a generation earlier. Moving beyond distinct disciplines such as geometry, algebra and topology, he worked in pursuit of a deeper, universal language to unify them all. At the heart of his work was a new conception of space, liberating it from the Euclidean tyranny of fixed points and bringing it into the 20th-century universe of relativity and probability. The flood of concepts and tools he introduced in the 1950s and 60s awed his peers.”
Then, in 1970, he quit his prestigious univesity position to drift amopng minor posts until 1990, when he disappeared into solitude altogether, living near a Pyranees village, without radio or telephone, seeing no one, scribbling thusands of pages of manuscripts about philosophy, mathematics, the secrets of plants, and speculations the universe. The notes have been assembled into a book: Harvests and Sowings.
URL: https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/aug/31/alexander-grothendieck-huawei-ai-artificial-intelligence