|
| ▲ | ian_j_butler 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > That book is fiction with a factual veneer. 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... |
| |
| ▲ | schrototo 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | throwaway81523 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The other article looks interesting, though it too has "blue banana" errors. Laurent Schwartz's autobiography "A Mathematician Grapples With His Century" has a more believable account of Schwartz and Dieudonné's work with Grothendieck. The Grothendieck Circle website (https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/mitanni/grothendi... since they haven't done a good job renewing domains) has a lot of Grothendieck's own writings (mostly in French) and Wilfried Scharlau's biography (in German). I tried to read those some years back but my language skills weren't up to it. Machine translation is much better now than it was then, so I might try the lazy approach. |
|
|
| ▲ | thedailymail 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I read and enjoyed that book out of a general interest in the history of ideas, but admit I am not able to judge the underlying mathematics. Is the "fiction" part only related to descriptions of his mathematical contributions, or are there problems with the biographical information as well? |
|
| ▲ | helterskelter 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
