Alexander Grothendieck, the secret genius of mathematics

Gérard Lebrun:

I was intrigued by the unusual path of Grothendieck, the recently deceased mathematician genius who, after twenty years of work that garnered him the 1966 Field Medal (the Nobel Prize for mathematicians) brutally severed all links with the mathematical community and lived for 45 years in seclusion and solitude, devoting himself to meditation, the search for meaning, and introspection. I tried to understand.

Outside the circle of mathematicians who are still exploring the paths opened by this visionary, there is little documentation on Grothendieck, except for an account written by his own hand, a kind of a diary that he kept (intimate and at the same time “extimate”, since he sent a few copies to former colleagues or former students, and considered publishing it at one point, but didn’t find a publisher) – a very long diary of over a thousand pages entitled “Crops and Seeds: Reflections and Testimony about my Past as a Mathematician.” Although unpublished then, the text has already been making its way to readers. I will quote a few excerpts from it, so that you can learn about and appreciate the ideas of a man in search of the absolute.