The Mysterious Disappearance of a Revolutionary Mathematician | The New Yorker

[Ruy Jose Guerra Barretto de Queiroz]

The Mysterious Disappearance of a Revolutionary Mathematician
Alexander Grothendieck was revered for revealing connections between seemingly unrelated realms. Then he dropped out of society.
By Rivka Galchen

May 9, 2022

“Whole fields of mathematics speak the language that he set up,” a professor said.

While living in an internment camp in Vichy France, Alexander Grothendieck was tutored in mathematics by another prisoner, a girl named Maria. Maria taught Grothendieck, who was twelve, the definition of a circle: all the points that are equidistant from a given point. The definition impressed him with “its simplicity and clarity,” he wrote years later. The property of perfect rotundity had until then appeared to him to be “mysterious beyond words.”

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(The New Yorker)