In France, died distinguished mathematician reclusive – DELFI.lv

In France, died distinguished mathematician Alexander Grothendieck. According to the newspaper Le Monde, 86-year-old scientist died on November 13 in a hospital in Saint-Girons near the village in the French Pyrenees, where he retired in the early 1990s and since then almost made itself felt.

Grothendieck known revolutionary contributions to algebraic geometry and significant achievements in number theory, category theory and homological algebra. Experts believe that without his discoveries would have been impossible discoveries in number theory and algebraic geometry over the past 30 years, the RIA “Novosti”.

Alexander Grothendieck was born in 1928 in Berlin. His father, Alexander Shapiro, was a native of Russia, anarchists and revolutionaries. At age 14 he joined a group of anarchists who were preparing an attempt on the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II.

However, the attempt to murder the emperor failed, and all members of the group were sentenced to death. Shapiro, as a minor, was pardoned by replacing the death penalty with life imprisonment. About 10 years he spent in the royal prison, and then forged documents fled to Germany.

There Shapiro met with the future mother of Alexander Grothendieck, journalist anarchist beliefs, Jewish Hanka Grothendieck. Being opposed bourgeois marriage, a couple of their relationship is not made, so their son, born in 1928, began to wear his mother’s surname. After coming to power in Germany, Adolf Hitler couple fled Germany, leaving her son in the care of a foster family. Six years later, the family was reunited in France, but soon all three were arrested.

Shapiro was sent to the camp Le Vernet, and from there to Auschwitz, where he died in 1942. Mother and son were in an internment camp in Rekro, two years later, Alexander was in a children’s home in Shambaugh, and to get a high school education, he entered the Sevennsky College, where he first appeared bright mathematical ability.

In May 1945, Grothendieck moved in with her mother Mesarzh, a village near Montpellier, where he enrolled in a local university, but quickly became disillusioned with lecturers and began to learn the science of their own.

1948-1949 years Grothendieck spent Higher normal school in Paris where he joined the legendary group of mathematicians who performed under the pseudonym “Nicolas Bourbaki”.

In 1949, Grothendieck moved to Nancy, who was then one of the largest centers of mathematical thought. Under the leadership of Schwartz Grothendieck studied functional analysis, which made a number of discoveries. However, due to a lack of French nationality Grothendieck had difficulties in finding jobs. In the end, went on invitation in Sao Paulo, where he spent two years.

In 1955 Grothendieck worked in the University of Kansas in the United States, where he began to engage in homological algebra. In 1956 Grothendieck returned to Paris, where he became a regular contributor to the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Here was born the basic theorems and definitions of Grothendieck, discover the mathematics new levels of abstraction, and wrote a famous treatise “Elements of algebraic geometry”.

Grothendieck always stood out for its active lifestyle. In protest against the suppression of dissent in the USSR (the process against dissidents Sinyavsky and Daniel) Grothendieck refuses to go to Moscow for the Congress of Mathematicians in 1966, where he had to hand the award Fields.

From the same award in 2006 he refused and reclusive Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman, who received worldwide fame after it proved the Poincaré conjecture and refused to award him for this Millennium Prize of one million dollars.

However, in the Grothendieck went to Vietnam in the midst war with the United States, where he lectured to students evacuated Hanoi University. In 1969 he retired from the Institute for Advanced Study, learning that he is partly funded by the military.

In 1970-1972 Grothendieck visiting professor at the College de France, in 1972-1973 he taught at Orsee, and in 1973 he became a professor at the University of Montpellier. In those same years, he dropped math and focused on the problems of biology, ecology, and esoterica.

However, he refused to receive French citizenship and traveled the Nansen passports for refugees. Grothendieck became a French citizen only in 1980.

In the 1984-1988 academic doing research at the National Center for Scientific Research. In 1988 Grothendieck declined to award him the Crafoord Prize, citing poor morale of the mathematical community. In the same year, at age 60, he retired.

Until 1990, Grothendieck wrote thousands of pages of manuscripts containing mathematical thought and non-mathematical thinking. However, in 1990 Grothendieck destroyed his papers and went to a village on the border of France Lasserre and Andorra, where he lived alone and led a meager economy, not giving news about himself.

In 2010, he sent his disciple Luke ilyuzy so-called “Declaration of unwillingness to be published.” In this letter, the reclusive mathematician insisted on stopping publication of his work, and even demanded that they be removed from the library.