> 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."
That book is fiction with a factual veneer. I liked it a lot until I started realizing that many of the details were made up. Then I couldn't read any more. It was like when TwoSetViolin described what it was like to watch movies with musician characters played, unrealistically, by non-musician actors. You'd be watching the perfectly fine movie until you noticed that the bananas were blue instead of yellow, with nobody mentioning it. After that the movie made no sense any more.
I hated the movie Oppenheimer for the same reason.
Definitely, but do check the link.. I dug it up originally by trying to track down detail about the nonfiction background that the book is pulling from. Seems like the best short source, but I'd love to hear recs for a good biography. The autobiography that Groth is careful to say is not an autobiography is on my shelf and also in pdf form. Haven't read it yet, but I'm not sure it's the type of thing that's going to cover the descent into madness properly.
There is an incredible (alas unfinished) multipart Grothendieck biography by the German mathematician Winfried Scharlau: Wer ist Alexander Grothendieck? Anarchie, Mathematik, Spiritualität, Einsamkeit. I think an English translation exists, at least for the first and in my opinion most interesting volume: Anarchy. It mostly deals with Grothendieck’s childhood and his parents, who lived unbelievably fascinating lives as anarchists in pre-war Berlin.
Interestingly, von Neumann's daughter was kind of shocked by the research the author did for the book The MANIAC; as a kid she carried graph paper in her pocket and Labatut had somehow found this out in his research and put it into the book, really blew her away I guess.
> 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 more life and times stuff I also suggest Labatut's Cease to Understand the World book and https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/konstantinos-foutzop...
I hated the movie Oppenheimer for the same reason.
Definitely, but do check the link.. I dug it up originally by trying to track down detail about the nonfiction background that the book is pulling from. Seems like the best short source, but I'd love to hear recs for a good biography. The autobiography that Groth is careful to say is not an autobiography is on my shelf and also in pdf form. Haven't read it yet, but I'm not sure it's the type of thing that's going to cover the descent into madness properly.
https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/slaoui/notes/recoltes_et_sem...