Grothendieck is revered in the world of math; outside of it, he’s known for his unusual life, if he’s known at all. But what were his actual mathematical contributions?
Mercedes deBellard for Quanta Magazine
Introduction
What Albert Einstein was to 20th-century physics, Alexander Grothendieck was to 20th-century mathematics. He is much less well known because math gets technical even more quickly than physics does. But as with Einstein, Grothendieck’s impact came not just from his own results, revolutionary though they were. His work also reoriented his entire discipline in radical new directions.
Grothendieck was intense and ascetic from his early days. Starting in the early 1950s, when he was in his 20s, he produced thousands of pages of formal and informal notes that changed the course of mathematics. Then in 1970, he quit. He left his post at a prestigious research institute just outside of Paris to teach at the provincial university in Montpellier where he studied as an undergraduate. He mostly stopped talking to other mathematicians. In the early 1990s, he moved to a small village in the Pyrenees, where he lived as a hermit.
