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One day in September 2014, in a hamlet in the French Pyrenean foothills, Jean-Claude, a landscape gardener in his late 50s, was surprised to see his neighbour at the gate. He hadn’t spoken to the 86-year-old in nearly 15 years after a dispute over a climbing rose that Jean-Claude had wanted to prune. The old man lived in total seclusion, tending to his garden in the djellaba he always wore, writing by night, heeding no one. Now, the long-bearded seeker looked troubled.
...
The hermit’s name was Alexander Grothendieck. Born in 1928, he arrived in France from Germany as a refugee in 1939, and went on to revolutionise postwar mathematics as Einstein had physics a generation earlier. Moving beyond distinct disciplines such as geometry, algebra and topology, he worked in pursuit of a deeper, universal language to unify them all. At the heart of his work was a new conception of space, liberating it from the Euclidean tyranny of fixed points and bringing it into the 20th-century universe of relativity and probability. The flood of concepts and tools he introduced in the 1950s and 60s awed his peers.
But also"If there is one thing in mathematics that fascinates me more than anything else (and doubtless always has), it is neither "number" nor "size", but always form. And among the thousand-and-one faces whereby form chooses to reveal itself to us, the one that fascinates me more than any other and continues to fascinate me, is the structure hidden in mathematical things." ~ Alexander Grothendieck
"Discovery is the privilege of the child: the child who has no fear of being once again wrong, of looking like an idiot, of not being serious, of not doing things like everyone else." ~ Alexander Grothendieck
"The introduction of the cipher 0 or the group concept was general nonsense too, and mathematics was more or less stagnating for thousands of years because nobody was around to take such childish steps." ~ Alexander Grothendieck
Grothendieck was without any doubt one of the most brilliant mathematicians in the 20th century.mcastillo356 said:Hi, PF, I've enjoyed reading the quote @jedishrfu has made. I've recalled "The old man and the sea", my first novel in English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck
It's a pity that my background is so far.
But John van Neumann was equally brilliant and was a jolly old soul.fresh_42 said:Grothendieck was without any doubt one of the most brilliant mathematicians in the 20th century.
He seems to me proof once again that brilliancy comes to a cost.
As far as I know there are examples: Newton, except for his erratic searches for gold: Kepler, Euler... and counterexamples: Godel, William Rowan Hamilton, his latest life years so troublesome.Hornbein said:But John van Neumann was equally brilliant and was a jolly old soul.
He had his special attitudes, too, e.g.Hornbein said:But John van Neumann was equally brilliant and was a jolly old soul.
Nico Semsrott said:Optimism is just a lack of information.
There is a very definite tendency for today's geniuses to be unsocial. There is also a definite tendency for them to go insane. But it's not 100%, that's my point.fresh_42 said:He had his special attitudes, too, e.g.
https://www.physicsforums.com/threa...at-numbers-and-corollary.992565/#post-6381538
Terry also seems to be immune to anti-social tendencies. But the other side lists: Perelman, Nash and many we could endlessly argue whether they belong on the list or not. I think that geniuses are sometimes just trapped in their own mental world. That allows them to find paths to solutions to problems others can't see, but sometimes requires enormous exertion to run the interface to the rest of the world.
Of course not. They are all very different in their ingenuity. These are areas where it becomes more and more questionable to compare people's minds. Erdös is another example of someone who obviously had no problems with personal interactions. Others, like Perelman seem to be less lucky.Hornbein said:There is a very definite tendency for today's geniuses to be unsocial. There is also a definite tendency for them to go insane. But it's not 100%, that's my point.