To the Memory of Alexander Grothendieck:

arXiv:1605.08112v1 [math.HO] 26 May 2016

a Great and Mysterious Genius of Mathematics

Wolfgang Bietenholza and Tatiana Peixotob
a

Instituto de Ciencias Nucleares

Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
A.P. 70-543, C.P. 04510 Distrito Federal , Mexico
b

Universidade Federal do ABC

C
ampus Santo Andre, CEP 09606-070, Brazil
In November 2014 Alexander Grothendieck passed away at the age of 86. There
is no doubt that he was one of the greatest and most innovative mathematicians
of the 20th century. After a bitter childhood, his meteoric ascent started in the
Cartan Seminar in Paris, it led to a breakthrough while he worked in Sao Paulo,
and to the Fields Medal. He introduced numerous new concepts and techniques,
which were involved in the groundbreaking solutions to long-standing problems.
However, dramatic changes were still ahead of him. In recent years hardly anybody
knew where he was living, and even if he was still alive; he had withdrawn to a modest life in isolation. Also beyond his achievements in mathematics, Grothendieck
was an extraordinary person. This is a tribute of his fascinating life.

Em mem
oria de Alexander Grothendieck:
um grande e misterioso g
enio da matem
atica
Em Novembro de 2014 Alexander Grothendieck faleceu aos seus 86 anos de
idade. N
ao h
a duvidas de que ele foi um dos maiores e mais criativos matematicos
do seculo XX. Ap
os uma inf
ancia amarga, sua ascensao meteorica iniciou no
Semin
ario Cartan em Paris, o que o levou a um avanco enquanto ele trabalhava
em S
ao Paulo, e a Medalha Fields. Ele introduziu numerosos novos conceitos e
tecnicas, que foram envolvidos nas solucoes inovadoras de problemas de longa data.
No entanto, mudancas dram
aticas ainda estavam por vir. Nos u
ltimos anos, quase
ninguem sabia onde ele estava morando, ou ate mesmo se ele estava vivo; ele havia
se retirado para uma vida modesta em isolamento. Tambem para alem dos seus
meritos em matem
atica, Grothendieck foi uma pessoa extraordinaria. Isso e um
tributo a sua fascinante vida.

An unusual family

Alexander Grothendiecks life was dominated by turbulence and radical turning points. As constant features, however, he followed consistently his own
path keeping away from anything established and whatever he did, he
did with absolute passion.
To capture the spirit of his highly unusual biography,1 we have to start
with his parents. His father whom Grothendieck honored very much
was Alexander Schapiro (1890-1942), born in the Russian town Novozybkov
(in the border region with Belarus and Ukraine), in an orthodox Jewish
community. Still very young he joined an armed anarchist group, which was
captured in 1905, after the failed attempt to overthrow the tsarist regime.
All members were executed, except for Alexander, who was pardoned to life
in prison due to his youth. About ten years later he escaped, and readily
joined another anarchist army, this time in the Ukraine. He was captured
again, sentenced to death, but he managed to escape once more (though he
lost his left arm).
Then he lived under the name Alexander Taranow in Berlin (and other
cities), where he worked as an independent photographer. Around 1924 he
met Hanka (actually Johanna) Grothendieck (1900-57), told her husband:
I will steal your wife and he proceeded in doing so. Hanka was a
far-left activist too, and she tried to become a journalist and writer, but
despite her talent she could not publish much. In 1928 their son Alexander
Grothendieck was born; Schurik this was his nickname lived for the first
five years with his parents and a half-sister in Berlin (in the Scheunenviertel).

Youth during World War II

In 1933, when the Nazis came to power, the situation was getting too dangerous for Schuriks father, who flew to Paris. Hanka joined him soon, and
left Schurik with a foster family in Hamburg. There he attended school from
1934-39 and lived in the home of Wilhelm Heydorn a former military officer and priest, who turned pacifist and atheist. Alexanders Jewish ancestry
was kept secret, but in 1939 Germany was getting too dangerous for him as
well, in particular because his foster parents opposed the Nazi regime. He
1

We adopt the biographical information essentially from Refs. [1, 2], but the most
complete source is Ref. [3]. We apologize for not quoting them each time.

Alexander (Schurik) Grothendieck a the age of 12.

was put on a train to France where he met his parents again; they were back
from the Spanish civil war, having supported an anarchist group. In 1940
the family was imprisoned in internment camps by the Vichy regime, which
collaborated with the Germans. Two years later, Alexander Taranow was
extradited to the Nazis, he was deported to Auschwitz where he died.
Also in 1942, 14-year-old Alexander arrived in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a
small town in the Massif Central, which was a center of resistance against the
German occupation. Here Alexander attended a school, which was devoted
to the spirit of pacifism. When there were raids by the Gestapo, he and other
pupils hided in the forest for a couple of days, divided into small groups [4].
In 1945 he finished his baccalaureate.
After the war his mother Hanka was released, and Alexander was closely
attached to her until her death in 1957.2 They moved to Montpellier, where
Alexander studied mathematics, and received a modest scholarship. The
local university was not very helpful to him, so he resorted mostly to autodidactic studies. He was particularly interested in a deep understanding of
space and geometry, starting with the notion of a point,3 and he elaborated
by himself a generalized concept of integration.4
2

Hanka died of tuberculosis, probably as a consequence of her confinement during the

war. However, she still witnessed her sons upcoming world fame.
3
Already in High School it upset him that his text books never gave a satisfactory
definition of terms like length, area and volume.
4
Apparently Hanka obstructed his contact with girls, which was certainly favorable
for the intensity of his studies. Nevertheless, in his later life he had five children with
three women. One of them, Mireille Dufour, was his wife in the 1960s. She was from the

A fairytale-like career

In 1948 Alexander was awarded a fellowship to go to Paris, where he got in

contact with mathematical research; in particular, he attended the famous
Cartan Seminar. He was not shy to discuss with famous scholars, he was ambitious and passionate; later he wrote jetais un mathematicien: quelquun
qui fait des maths, au plein sens du terme comme on fait lamour [4]. Initially he hoped for his independent work to provide a quick Ph.D., but he was
told that he had essentially re-discovered the Lebesgue integral (which had
been known since the early 20th century). Also later, as a highly established
mathematician, he always followed his own ideas, rather than studying the
literature (he got informed about relevant results in discussions).
Since Alexander wanted to explore Topological Vector Spaces, Henri Cartan and Andre Weil recommended him to move to the University of Nancy, in
Northern France, where two leading experts were working: Jean Dieudonne
and Laurent Schwartz the latter was also a pioneer in Distribution Theory,
and he just won a Fields Medal.5 He showed his new student his latest paper;
it ended with a list of 14 open questions, relevant for locally convex spaces.
Alexander went ahead and introduced new methods, which allowed him to
solve all these problems within a few months! A mathematical superstar
appeared, at the age of 22, with a chaotic youth and sparse education.
Despite his success, it was difficult for him to find a job in France, in
particular because he was stateless. His advisors mentioned the unfortunate
situation of this young genius, and found a visitor position for him at the
University of Sao Paulo, where Alexander stayed from 1952-54 [5]. The contact was established by Paulo Ribenboim, a Brazilian student of the same
age as Alexander, who also worked in Nancy (later he became a prominent
mathematician in Canada). In that period, legendary president Get
ulio Vargas was in power in Brazil, and Alexander finished his Ph.D. thesis on Tensor
Products and Nuclear Spaces (the second term he had introduced himself).
According to Dieudonne, at that time he had already results that would have
Normandy, a little older than Alexander, and she also had links to the anarchist movement
in Spain. It is reported that even their marriage had an touch of anarchy; now Alexander
had a variety of affairs.
5
The Fields Medal is the highest distinction in mathematics, sometimes regarded equivalent to a Nobel Prize (though there is an age limit of 40). It is awarded at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), the largest mathematical conference, which is
held once every four years (it coincides with the year of the Soccer World Cup).

The young mathematician Grothendieck, in a picture taken by Paulo Ribenboim in 1951.

been sufficient for six theses, covering also functional analysis. He published
in Brazilian journals (in French), where he introduced the Grothendieck Inequality, and he lectured on Topological Vector Spaces; his lecture notes were
published as well [6]. Meanwhile he started to shift his focus of interest towards Algebraic Geometry the field where he ultimately had his strongest
impact; it involves the systematic analysis of the geometric properties of the
solutions to polynomial equations.
Alexander worked with full intensity, essentially he only paused to sleep
and eat. Schwartz, his Ph.D. advisor, asked Ribenboim to encouraged him
to do occasionally other things in life at that time without success. His
mother visited him in Brazil, which presumably again prevented him from
being side-tracked (cf. footnote 4). His colleague Chaim Honig (who came to
Brazil before the war, as a German refugee) later remembered that Alexander
led a spartan and lonely existence, living sometimes of milk and bananas,
and he got frustrated when he failed to solve a problem despite hard work.
Still, the problems that he did solve, and the methods that he introduced,
boosted his meteoric career.

 1958-70
The Golden Era at IHES,

After a short stay in Kansas, Grothendieck returned to France. Together

with Dieudonne and Jean-Pierre Serre, he soon worked at the newly founded

near Paris, which became

Institut des Hautes Etudes
Scientifiques (IHES)
famous for its research in mathematics and theoretical physics. Grothendieck
led a group of brilliant young mathematicians. This era of excellence, 195870, coincided with the climax of the Bourbaki group, which Grothendieck was
in contact with (for some years he was a member). When a visitor noticed
that the library of the new institute was rather incomplete, Grothendieck
replied: We dont read books, we write them [1].
His former colleague Pierre Cartier asserts that he run one of the most
prestigious mathematics seminars that the world has ever seen [7]. It attracted top mathematicians from France and all over the world. Session could
take 10 to 12 hours, leading to improvised notes that Grothendieck gave to
Dieudonne, who would then rewrite them in a neat form. Grothendieck is
remembered as an excellent teacher, who explained also trivial points patiently, with a talent to suggest the appropriate subject to each member of
his group. His motivation was simply to understand, not competition.
He had anticipated his research program for these years in a plenary talk
at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh, 1958. His
style was to search for ever increasing generality and abstraction (which was
a trend of mathematics in the 20th century), introducing accurate new terms
and concepts, and working out their properties. His colleague John Tate emphasizes that Grothendieck found again and again exactly the right level of
abstraction, so he was neither dealing with a special case, nor with a pointless
vacuum. This led to thousands of pages on the merger of Algebraic Geometry, Arithmetics and Topology. His interest was mostly in new, generic
concepts, like schemes, etales, toposes and motives; for popular descriptions
we refer to Refs. [7, 8], or (more detailed and technical) Ref. [9]. Grothendieck
hardly appreciated applications in natural science, like physics.6 Even the
proofs of explicit mathematical theorems were an inspiration for him, but
not really the ultimate goal. However, Gerd Faltings proofs of the Tate and
the Mordell Conjecture, as well as Andrew Wiles proof of Fermats Last
Theorem, can all be viewed as applications of motives.
For a number of years, Grothendieck proved step by step aspects of the
6

Occasionally he got a bit interested in biology, encouraged by a friend in Romania.

On the left: A seminar at the Institut des Hautes Etudes

Scientifiques (IHES)
ements de
near Paris. On the right: front page of Grothendiecks book El
Geometry Algebrique.
Weil Conjectures (dating back to 1949), which inspired amazing new concepts. Later, in 1974, his former student Pierre Deligne proved the last point
of these conjectures. However, he invoked a classical result, deviating from
the program of a generalized context, which employs motives, as sketched
seminars. His mentor appreciated this success, but he was still
in the IHES
somehow disappointed.
and
In 1970, at the age of 42, Grothendieck abruptly resigned from IHES,
entered a completely different phase of his life. Soon afterwards his brilliant
research group fell apart.

New interests, and a new life style

Until 1970 Grothendiecks life was almost non-stop focused on mathematics

(later he called it his long period of mathematical frenzy [4]), and his
life style seemed rather bourgeois. People described him as friendly, direct,
by no means arrogant, idealistic but for issues beyond mathematics
somewhat nave. However, other issues of the world did come to his mind,
and gradually became dominant. In particular, he felt strongly committed
to pacifism.
Since the late 1950s he was wearing Russian peasant cloths and shaved
his head, in the memory of his father, and he liked to wear sandals made of
tire. When he was invited to Harvard University in 1958, he criticized the
visa requirement of swearing that he would refrain from subversive actions.
7

Like other prominent mathematicians, he opposed to the French colonial war

in Algeria, 1954-62. In 1966 he was awarded the Fields Medal, which he was
supposed to receive in Moscow, but he did not show up, referring to two
Russian writers who were arrested.7 Still, he did visit Eastern European
countries at other occasions, and his ideas had a remarkable influence among
Russian mathematicians, like Vladimir Drinfeld, Maxim Kontsevich, Yuri
Manin and Vladimir Voevodsky.
Meanwhile the students movement of the 1960s gained more and more
momentum, and culminated in May 1968 in Paris. Grothendieck was strongly
impressed, but he found himself on the wrong side he felt attracted to
the role of an outlaw, not to the establishment. He sympathized with the
movement, which involved in part anarchist ideas, but he did not attend
public rallies; also in this respect he followed his own path.
In 1967 Grothendieck received a request from Hanoi, asking for literature
about Algebra and Algebraic Geometry. He had not been aware that there
was mathematical research going on in North Vietnam, even during the worst
period of the second Vietnam War, and he provided as much material as he
could. Moreover, Grothendieck decided to travel to North Vietnam himself
to give lectures. After a first part in Hanoi, the cluster bombing by the US
Air Force intensified so much8 that he and his Vietnamese attendees (among
them Ta Quang Buu, mathematician and Minister of Higher Education and
Technology, who frequently asked questions) moved to a hidden place in the
forest to continue the lecture (during the breaks, Grothendieck went to a
near-by river to wash his cloths). In 2013 Neal Koblitz, a mathematician
from the USA, visited this place, and he was intrigued by the fact that the
course given there could have been presented as well at Harvard University, where Koblitz had been studying at that time [10]. After his return to
France, Grothendieck gave talks about his visit and wrote a detailed report
[11], which informed the world about the mathematical community in North
Vietnam. While he described the state as somewhat over-regulated, his report firmly expresses his sympathy for the underdogs of this destructive war,
which lasted for 30 years in total, and left nearly 4 millions of people killed.
in 1970, the reason he gave was that he
When Grothendieck quit IHES
had discovered that his institute received funds for the French military. Ac director Leon Motchane received the Fields Medal at the International Congress
IHES
of Mathematicians in Moscow, on Grothendiecks behalf.
8
A week after Grothendiecks arrival, the campus of the Hanoi Polytechnical Institute
was hit by delay-action bombs, which killed two mathematicians.
7

On the left: Grothendieck in the Vietnamese rain forest, 100 km from Hanoi.
On the right: a picture of 1975, characteristic for his new life style.
tually this was known before, and many scientists objected, so in 1969 an
agreement was reached to stop this practice. However, only one year later
the agreement was broken. Grothendieck tried to convince his colleagues to
resign in protest, but it was only him who really did so. Although this was
budget, it was an ethical problem for
about a minor fraction of the IHES
him for instance, his Ph.D. advisor Schwartz had been working hard to

transform the Ecole

Polytechnique from a military to a civilian orientation.
Research with military purposes was not acceptable for Grothendieck, and
this was also a reason why physics was suspicious to him, keeping in mind
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.9
However, there might have been other reasons involved in this radical
a decrease in
turning point of his life: conflicts with colleagues at IHES,
creativity, and the consciousness that his ambitious goals would never be
completed.10 Was there also some burnout or mid-life crises involved?
9

On the other hand, although his mathematical style was very abstract, some of his
concepts did propagate into theoretical physics, in particular in constructive field theory,
which was elaborated in the 1970s. A later example is non-commutative geometry, which
was on the formal side strongly developed by Alain Connes, who adopted ideas by
Grothendieck. It became a wide-spread fashion in theoretical physics in the late 1990s.
Yet another example is the Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem, which relates the zero modes of
a chiral Dirac operator to the topological charge of its gauge background. Its derivation
involved Grothendieck Groups, which emerged from his new proof of the Riemann-Roch
Theorem, and which became later a point of departure for K-Theory.
10
ements de
He had outlined a monumental program to write a series entitled El

In any case, Grothendieck changed his life style, he got separated from
his wife Mireille, and opened communes, first in Paris and later in Southern
France. There he lived with a variety of people, at times three of his children
were among them, and political meetings were held. Meanwhile he lectured
on a temporary basis, first at the University Paris-Sud in Orsay, and then in
the College de France. In his courses he took the opportunity to discuss also
issues like the threat by nuclear weapons. This attracted a broad audience,
but the College direction was not amused, and denied him a permanent
position, even though he was one of the most famous mathematicians in the
world.
In 1973 he moved back to the University of Montpellier (although its
Mathematics Department did still not match his standard) and gave lectures
on all levels. He was friendly to his students, who dubbed him Alexandre
le Grand, he distributed organic apples, and gave inspiring courses. He did
not run a highly ambitious seminar anymore, but he still had several Ph.D.
students (and he got angry when the Springer Publishing House declined
publishing a thesis). Still he led excellent research, but the French research
agency CNRS only provided marginal support.
From 1973-79 he lived in the tiny village Olmet-et-Villecun, 50 km from
Montpellier, in a simple house without electricity (he used kerosene lamps
to work at night). He did not hesitate to give shelter to homeless people.
Generally, his home was open for everybody, and it became a meeting place
for all kind of people, including the hippie movement. In 1977 it was raided
by the police, which were looking for anything possibly illegal. All they found
was a Japanese citizen, who was staying there, and whose French visa had
expired. He was an peaceful person, who had studied mathematics, but at
that time he was a Buddhist monk. Half a year later (when the monk had
long left France), Grothendieck was actually accused for giving shelter and
food to a foreigner in an irregular situation. He defended himself with a
passionated speech, and many mathematicians gave him public support, but
he got convicted to a heavy fine and a six-months suspended sentence.
Geometry Algebrique in 13 volumes. Only four volumes appeared, comprising about
1800 pages.

10

Environmental and peace movement

Meanwhile Grothendieck questioned intensively the sense of scientific research he reported that in many discussions, nobody could really give
a reason for it. He got more and more concerned about ecological problems
and militarism, in particular the danger of a nuclear war. He was convinced
that everyone, who was given the relevant information, would follow his logical arguments and agree with his conclusions, and that he had a mission to
spread this message.
When he was invited to lecture at a Summer School in Montreal, he accepted under the condition that he could not only lecture about mathematics,
but also about the threats to humanity. In fact, some young mathematicians
followed his ideas, and became activists as well. He also gave double lectures
in the USA, where he further supported the rights of Native Americans.
A Ph.D. student named Justine Skalba was particularly excited about his
charisma and intelligence. She followed him to France as his partner for a
few years (their son was born after the relation had ended, but he later did
a Ph.D. in mathematics). Justine remembers a rally in Avignon that they
attended together; when it was harassed by the police, Grothendieck knocked
down two policemen, and got arrested.
Together with another two prominent French mathematicians, Claude
Chevalley and Pierre Samuel, he founded a group called International Movement for the Survival of the Human Race. It published the magazine Vivre,
or later Survivre et Vivre, with emphatic calls for peace and against pollution,
discussions of the impact of science, and a critical view of the consumerismminded society (in part inspired by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse). He
wrote a considerable number of articles for this magazine, which appeared
from 1970-75; copies are available in the internet [12].11
When Grothendieck attended the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice, 1970, he installed a desk to distribute this magazine, together
with his eldest son Serge (from a premarital relation), and tried to recruit
new members to his movement (with limited success). Dieudonne, who was
responsible for the event, stubbornly objected, until they moved the desk
outside the building, but there they got in trouble with the police.
At a Summer School 1972 in Antwerp, Serre gave the opening speech.
11
It goes without saying that this movement was also confronted with dismissive reactions; e.g. Ref. [7] describes it as a dooms-day sect, which was obsessed by pollution.

11

On the left: a page of the magazine Survivre et Vivre: it compares the drawing by a child and by an adult. On the right: announcement of Grothendiecks
talk at CERN, 1972, entitled Are we going to continue the scientific research?.
colleague, to speak
Grothendieck vociferously interrupted his former IHES
out against NATO, which had sponsored this event.12 He did not hesitate
to be provocative (lenfant terrible), even if this led to resentment with longterm friends and collaborators.
Of course he was confronted with the reproach of overdoing it in an immature manner. However, for instance a talk of two hours, including an
extensive discussion with the audience, that he gave at CERN in 1972 (now
accessible on YouTube) sounds calm and thoughtful: he was aware, of course,
that CERN does not focus on nuclear research (in contrast to its name).
He explained why he took distance from the scientific community, with its
competition and pressure to publish, which are unjust and unfavorable for
creativity, and which keeps researchers working without ever wondering for
what reason. He also recalled mathematicians who had committed suicide.
He further pointed out why he now considered actions against the threats to
humanity like nuclear weapons far more important.
Despite his conviction and arguments, the use of his academic reputation
and his rhetorical skills, his group remained small. It mostly attracted people
who had similar views before, and around 1973 a trend of dissolution set
12

As a reaction, a NATO representative, who had intended to join the Summer School
for a public debate, backed off. Subsequently Grothendieck was blamed for having done
some kind of damage.

12

in. Grothendieck was disappointed and considered his efforts as a failure.

He concluded that people, even scientists, were blind to the dangers to the
world, and do not behave rationally.
Other members of this movement, like Samuel (who was an editor of Survivre et Vivre until 1973), patiently carried on efforts along these lines. From
todays perspective, these actions appear as pioneering work for the peace
and environmental movement, which later became influential to some extent in Europe and beyond. Also within science, ecological concerns were
later acknowledged, e.g. with the 1995 Chemistry Nobel Prize for demonstrating the danger to the Earths ozone layer. Today, for instance global
warming due to human activities is only disbelieved by some people who are
at odds with science. So we could ask if Grothendiecks activism in the early
1970s was really immature, or if he was rather ahead of his time?

Spiritualism and isolation

Frustrated about his modest success as an activist, Grothendieck slowed

down his appeals to the public. He kept writing long manuscripts, with
magnitudes of 1000 pages, like La Longue Marche `a travers la theorie de
Galois,13 A la Pursuite de Champs and Esquisse dun Programme with ideas
for future mathematics. Indeed, that Programme was worked out to a large
extent by the young mathematicians Leila Schneps and Pierre Lochak, who
were impressed by its farsighted vision. They contacted Grothendieck, who
suddenly expressed his interest in physics and asked for literature about it
[1] (although he regretted its lack of rigor). Later they also initialized the
Grothendieck Circle, which created an informative web page [12], and Schneps
edited an overview over Grothendiecks mathematical achievements [13].
In the period 1983-88, Grothendieck wrote a stylistically brilliant book
entitled Recoltes et Semailles [4], where he reviews his life and work, supplemented by all kinds of elements, like love poems (in German) and (sometimes
critical) comments on the mathematical community and former colleagues.

Grothendieck had a special esteem for Evariste

Galois, whom he called his fr`ere de
temperament [4]. In fact the two mathematical geniuses had a number of points in common: a push for a new level of abstraction and a major interest in the relation among
mathematical objects; now the term Grothendiecks Galois Theory is used. Moreover,
both had an early end of their career (Galois case was far more extreme), and they were
radical activists for what each one considered, in his epoch, as an urgent progress of society.
13

13

In Section 2.20 he addressed modern physics. From a mathematical perspective, he did not consider Einsteins Theory of Relativity very interesting, although he appreciated its importance for our paradigm of space-time.
Mathematically, however, he described the transition from Newtons Theory to Relativity like a change from one French dialect to another, whereas
Quantum Theory is like a transition to Chinese. This he did find interesting,
regarding his deep understanding of a point, and he mentions an intuitive
similarity to his concept of toposes. We add a comment in Appendix A.
In 1988 he was supposed to receive the prestigious Crafoord Prize by
the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, together with his former student
Deligne, but Grothendieck declined. In a polite letter [14] he explained his
reasons: first he did not need money, and about the importance of his work,
time and offspring would decide, not honors. He adds that such prizes are
constantly given to the wrong people, who do not need further wealth nor glorification. He asks whether this superabundance for some is not provided
at the cost of the needs of others? Finally, he points out that agreeing to
participate in the game of prizes would imply his approval to the spirit . . .
of the scientific world, where ethics has declined to the point that outright
theft among colleagues (especially at the expenses of those who are in no
position to defend themselves) has nearly become a general rule.
Also in 1988 he retired from Montpellier University, and in 1991 even
from society; he broke off contacts with almost everybody, including his
family. He withdrew to a modest life in a hamlet in the French Pyrenees,
not far from Vernet Camp (the redoubtable camp, where his father had
been imprisoned before being deported to Auschwitz). He still wrote the
mathematical program Les Derivateurs (about 2000 pages), which he handed
over to a friend. On the other hand, he once burned a huge amount of
notes, letters and other documents, one estimates 25 000 pages. His main
interest now shifted to spiritualism and meditation, and he entered the final,
Steppenwolf-like phase of his life.
For quite some time, since the 1970s, he was strongly interested in Buddhism. There are hints that this helped him to relax from the pressure of
productivity, and to improve the relation with his ex-wife Mireille. He was
a strict vegetarian and received Buddhist teachers. He was also fascinated
by the symbols of Yin and Yang [4], and characterized his style of research
as Yin.14 Later, however, he moved on to a mystic and unconventional form
14

Deligne describes a proof by Grothendieck as a lengthy sequence of trivial steps,

14

Grothendieck in his older days.

of Christianity. He spent a period of starving, which endangered his health.
He got much interested in dreams, which he considered the messengers of
spiritual wisdom, and he studied Freuds interpretation.
As his main activity, he kept on writing; daily he spent many hours
typing about his mystic experiences and ideas, which led again to thousands
of pages. Although he assumed his visions to be relevant for the future
society, he did not want to publish these notes. In 2010 a bizarre (but
well formulated) hand-written letter appeared, where he even requested the
removal of all his works from the libraries.
Only very few people knew where he lived and promised not to spread
this information. He did not have a postal address nor a telephone, let alone
internet, and he did not receive uninvited visitors. At last the world learned
that he has died, on November 13, 2014, in the village of Saint-Lizier in the
French Pyrenees Alexander Schurik Grothendieck, rest in peace.

Points in physics

When Grothendieck writes that he finds Einsteins Relativity mathematically

banal [4], he includes General Relativity. That is based on mathematics
of the 19th century, in particular Differential Geometry, which is actually
nothing seems to happen, but yet at the end a highly non-trivial theorem is there. This
is in contrast to Serres Yang-style of striving for a solution in one strike [9].

15

non-trivial (by common perception). Nevertheless, his statement becomes

plausible if it addresses a specific, fundamental understanding of geometry,
in particular the very nature of a point; we have mentioned before that this
issue has haunted Grothendieck since his youth. In this regard, he considers
Quantum Mechanics far more interesting.
In Ref. [4], p. 69, he writes: And these probability clouds, which replace
the certain material particles that we had before, remind me strangely of
the elusive open neighborhoods which inhabit the toposes, such evanescent
ghosts, which surround fictitious points, which keep on attaching themselves,
in contrast to a recalcitrant imagination.
The state of a quantum mechanical particle is given by a (time-dependent)
vector in a Hilbert space, in Paul Diracs notation |(t)i, and the position
eigenstates |xi form a basis. The scalar product (t, x) = hx|(t)i is the
particles wave function, and |(t, x)|2 its probability cloud.
Hence standard Quantum Mechanics is still formulated in a standard coordinate space with a continuum of sharp points, where the particle wave
functions are accommodated. The spatial resolution is not limited in principle, if sufficiently large momenta are available to resolve it. So a possible
analogy to toposes could rather refer to phase space, where points do have a
conceptually limited resolution given by Heisenbergs Uncertainty Relation hence there are only fuzzy points.
On the other hand, angular momenta only take sharp, discrete values. A
deep understanding of this interplay between discrete and continuous, sharp
and fuzzy, could have been something for Grothendiecks taste.
There have been attempts to employ toposes in an unconventional formulation of Quantum Mechanics, with the hope to alleviate problems with the
interpretation of measurements on quantum systems; for reviews see Refs.
[15].
We still do not have a convincing merger of Quantum Physics with General Relativity, but a Lorentz covariant formulation (hence a conciliation with
Special Relativity) is accomplished by Quantum Field Theory. But again,
the usual formulation, which encompasses in particular the (tremendously
successful) Standard Model of Particle Physics, employs a simple Minkowski
space. Thus the fields are still functions of sharp points in space-time this
does still not seem exciting in view of Grothendiecks particular motivation,
at least at first sight.
One might object that some regularization of high momentum contributions is required, to suppress the omnipresent ultraviolet singularities. This
16

corresponds to some kind of truncation of short distances, i.e. a somehow

granular space-time (its structure depends on the regularization scheme).15
In theories like Quantum Chromodynamics (the sector of the Standard Model
that describes the strong interaction), this truncation can be fully removed
at the end of the calculation, i.e. one extrapolates to the continuum limit,
hence it is just a mathematical trick. Also the electroweak sector was shown
to be renormalizable, which allows to remove the cutoff at the end. On the
other hand, in the Higgs sector of the Standard Model, a complete removal
of the truncation would also remove the interactions, so the Higgs field becomes free and does no longer do its job of providing the elementary particle
masses. Usually physicists dont worry much about this property (which is
known as triviality), since a huge momentum cutoff, extremely far above the
experimentally accessible regime, is sufficient to justify the observed mass of
the Higgs boson.16 However, from a fundamental geometric point of view,
one might pay more attention to this aspect.
Based on reports of people who talked to Grothendieck in his old days,
he seemed interested in the question if the constants of Nature are related by
rational ratios. Usually we do not assume that (e.g. we do not have reasons
to expect the fine structure constant = e2 /(40 h
c) ' 1/(137.036), or
the ratios of particle masses, to be rational), but it is certainly the case for
the electric particle charges. Dirac gave an explanation for this property,
but it requires the existence of at least one magnetic monopole, for which
we do not have any evidence. In the Standard Model and some (though
not all) of its variants in particular incorporating neutrino masses
that property can also be deduced from the theoretical requirement of gauge
anomaly cancellations.
In the framework of the diverse attempts to achieve compatibility of
Quantum Theory also with General Relativity, i.e. to include also gravity,
quite general arguments suggest an extension to a pure space-time uncertainty relation, which should be manifest at extremely short distances, of the
order of the Planck scale ( 1035 m), see e.g. Ref. [17]. That corresponds
to a non-commutative geometry, where the coordinates in independent directions are given by Hermitian operators, which do not commute. We speculate
15

The scheme that works at finite interaction (i.e. beyond perturbation theory) performs
indeed a reduction to a lattice of discrete (but sharp) space-time points.
16
It is now getting popular to interpret the Standard Model as a low energy effective
theory, valid up to some energy range above the scale of experiments, which is sufficient
for practical purposes.

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that this could have attracted Grothendiecks interest.

We have mentioned in footnote 9 that the formal aspects of physics in a
non-commutative space have been elaborated rigorously by Connes. He did
apply some concepts by Grothendieck, but regarding toposes his comprehensive book on this subject, Ref. [16], only contains the remark: One could
base this extension of topology on the notion of toposes due to Grothendieck.
Our aim, however, is to establish contact with the powerful tools of functional
analysis such as positivity and Hilbert space techniques, and with K-theory.
From the physical perspective we add that Quantum Field Theory formulated in a non-commutative space is plagued by severe obstacles: first
we cannot instal fields for the non-Abelian gauge groups SU (2) and SU (3),
which belong to the Standard Model. Next a non-commutative space-time
entails non-local interactions which also occur in String Theory and
which raise questions regarding the principle of causality. That might be
acceptable if these non-local effects were restricted to tiny ranges (like the
Planck scale), but for interacting quantum fields, a non-commutative spacetime further gives rise to a new type of singularity in the infrared regime.
Hence quantum effects are expected also at very long distances, even if one
modifies the geometry only within a tiny range. This theoretical phenomenon
known as ultraviolet-infrared mixing has prevented a valid confrontation with particle phenomenology, which could confirm or constrain a spacetime non-commutativity in Nature, and thus the existence of fuzzy points,
which bear a resemblance to the open neighborhoods in the Grothendieck
toposes.
A shorter version of this article has been published in Spanish [18].

References
[1] A. Jackson, Comme Appele du Neant As If Summoned from the
Void: The Life of Alexandre Grothendieck, Notices of the American
Mathematical Society 51 (2004) 1038-1056 and 1196-1212.
[2] W. Scharlau, Who is Alexander Grothendieck?, Notices of the American Mathematical Society 55 (2008) 930-941.

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[3] W. Scharlau, Wer ist Alexander Grothendieck? Anarchie, Mathematik,

Spiritualitat, Einsamkeit, Series of various volumes, the completed
parts are available from the author.
[4] A. Grothendieck, Recoltes at Semailles, Reflexions et temoignage sur
un passe de mathematicien, unpublished. Available in French, and
partly also in other languages, in the internet (929 pages).
[5] A. de Azevedo, Grothendieck no Brasil, Matematica Universitaria 44
(2008) 39-42.
[6] A. Grothendieck, Espaces vectoriels topologiques, Sociedade de
Matematica de Sao Paulo, 1964 (3rd edition).
[7] P. Cartier, A Mad Days Work: from Grothendieck to Connes and
Kontsevich. The Evolution of Concepts of Space and Symmetry, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 38 (2001) 389-408. Alexander Grothendieck, A Country Known Only by Name, Interference
Intenational Review of Science 1 (2014) 1-16.
[8] D. Mumford and J. Tate, Alexander Grothendieck (1928 2014) Mathematician who rebuilt algebraic geometry, Nature 517 (2015) 272.
[9] C. McLarty, The Rising Sea: Grothendieck on simplicity and generality
I, Lecture notes dated 2003 (available in the internet [12]).
[10] N. Koblitz, Grothendiecks 1967 Lectures in the Forest in Vietnam,
The Mathematical Intelligencer 35 (2013) 32-34.
[11] A. Grothendieck, Mathematical Life in the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam, unpublished, English translation by N. Koblitz available in
the internet.
[12] www.grothendieckcircle.org
[13] L. Schneps (ed.), Alexandre Grothendieck: A Mathematical Portrait,
International Press of Boston, 2014.
[14] A. Grothendieck, letter published in The Mathematical Intelligencer 11
(1989) 35.

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[15] A. Doring and C. Isham, What is a Thing?: Topos Theory in the

Foundations of Physics, Lecture Notes in Physics 813 (2011) 753-940.
C. Flori, Lectures on Topos Quantum Theory, arXiv:1207.1744 [mathph].
[16] A. Connes, Non-commutative geometry, Academic Press (1994).
[17] S. Doplicher, K. Fredenhagen and J.E. Roberts, The Quantum structure of space-time at the Planck scale and quantum fields, Communications in Mathematical Physics 172 (1995) 187-220.
[18] W. Bietenholz, Alexander Grothendieck: la fascinante vida de un genio
matematico, CIENCIAS, Revista de cultura cientfica (UNAM, Mexico) 117 (2015) 4-11.

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