Thanks to Shiva Shankar for posting Alexander Grothendieck was a mathematician hailed as a genius who embraced militant activism telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11231703/Alexander-Grothendieck-obituary.html Alexander Grothendieck, who has died aged 86, was considered the greatest pure mathematician of the second half of the 20th century, his name uttered with the same reverence among mathematicians as that of Einstein among physicists. Yet in the 1970s he effectively abandoned his brilliant academic career and, in 1991, disappeared altogether A mathematician of staggering accomplishment (one reference work described him as .the mathematician whose work was to lead to a unification of geometry, number theory, topology and complex analysis.), Grothendieck.s ubiquitous presence in almost all branches of pure mathematics between 1955 and 1970 revolutionised the subject, in recognition of which he was awarded the Fields Medal (the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize) in 1966. His extraordinary creativity expressed itself in the form of thousands of pages of mathematical literature ... ... Grothendieck.s most creative period was spent at the French Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES), and his time there was regarded ever after as the institute.s .Golden Age., during which a whole new school of mathematics flourished under Grothendieck.s charismatic leadership. He established the IHES as a world centre of algebraic geometry, with him as its driving force. There was, however, another Grothendieck, a man who felt deeply about the world.s injustices. As a young student, he had decided not to study physics (despite his love for the subject), as he saw the discipline, after Hiroshima, as hopelessly compromised. During the Vietnam War, to protest against American imperialism, he gave lectures on category theory in the forests around Hanoi while the city was being bombed. In the 1960s he refused to participate in conferences supported by Nato, Nasa or other defence interests. In some cases conference organisers went to the length of securing alternative funding in order to secure his participation. In 1966, when he was awarded the Fields Medal, he refused to travel to Moscow for the ceremony in protest at Soviet militarism. His career reached a crisis in 1970 when he discovered that IHES was being funded in part, and indirectly, by the French Ministry of Defence. This triggered a bitter debate between Grothendieck and the founder of IHES, Leo Motchane, who maintained a clear division between scientific matters, which were left to the professors, and financial ones, which were the director.s domain. Grothendieck poured scorn on the ease with which colleagues had accepted the situation, observing that their willingness to accept military funding had not prevented them .from professing the ideas of the Left. or from being indignant at colonial wars. They generally justify this by saying that this did not limit in any sense their independence or freedom of thought. They refuse to see that this collaboration gives an aura of respectability and liberalism to this apparatus of control, destruction and depreciation. This is something that shocked me.. ...
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 04:34:25 +0000
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