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ParacompactJan 2026

Another quote of Grothendieck's that has always stuck with me:

"Since then I’ve had the chance in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my 'elders' and among young people in my general age group who were more brilliant, much more ‘gifted’ than I was. I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle–while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things I had to learn (so I was assured) things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end. Indeed, there was little about me that identified the kind of bright student who wins at prestigious competitions or assimilates almost by sleight of hand, the most forbidding subjects.

"In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still from the perspective or thirty or thirty five years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They’ve done all things, often beautiful things in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they’ve remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birthright, as it was mine: The capacity to be alone."

(From _Récoltes et Semailles_)

It's only a shame that most aspiring mathematicians with the same disposition as Grothendieck, never do reach the same level of accomplishment and acclaim as Grothendieck, before concluding that they are, in their final opinion, like clumsy, oafish oxen compared to their colleagues.

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jimmy76615Oct 2023

Grothendieck's non mathematical work has always fascinated me, he really has a great style of writing (judging by “recoltes et semailles”).

The great thing about reading the works of people that are as close to mental illness as he was is that they seem to be unable to establish any emotional distance to their works. When someone like him writes about evil, you know that he was looking directly into the devil's eyes when he wrote about it. He didn’t leave his desk that they to watch Breaking Bad, he couldn’t have. His gift of extreme perception haunted him. Awake and asleep.

Grothendieck’s mind became used to the kind of thinking that made him such an outstanding mathematician. He was all about finding the essence of everything. Distill every idea and every concept to find its underlying core. He was always obsessed, always all-in.

Most of us perceive the world around us in two different dimensions. One abstract and rational, and one subconscious and shaped by culture. What made Grothendieck so special is that his conscious thinking almost immediately reshaped his subconscious concept of our world.

I felt similar about Ted Kaczynski when reading the Unabomber’s manifest. Kaczynski could not walk away from thoughts that most of us would contain in the "intellectual theories” corner of our mind. But just as with Grothendieck, he had just such a loud inner voice that he couldn’t help but to always listen to it. This voice controlled his feelings, this voice controlled his world.

It must be hard to life like that, but it also creates extremely potent literature.

Every sentence born in pain.

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crdbNov 2022

"Récoltes et semailles" (Harvest and plantings) by Alexander Grothendieck.

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hasseweylJun 2020

Alexander Grothendieck - Récoltes et Semailles

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uptownfunkJul 2019

Grothendieck's Récoltes et semailles (Harvest and planting)

One of the most underrated mathematicians of the 20th c.

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joaoricoNov 2014

Here's one of his staggering quotes [1], worth reading through:

"In those critical years I learned how to be alone. [But even] this formulation doesn't really capture my meaning. I didn't, in any literal sense learn to be alone, for the simple reason that this knowledge had never been unlearned during my childhood. It is a basic capacity in all of us from the day of our birth. However these three years of work in isolation [1945–1948], when I was thrown onto my own resources, following guidelines which I myself had spontaneously invented, instilled in me a strong degree of confidence, unassuming yet enduring, in my ability to do mathematics, which owes nothing to any consensus or to the fashions which pass as law....By this I mean to say: to reach out in my own way to the things I wished to learn, rather than relying on the notions of the consensus, overt or tacit, coming from a more or less extended clan of which I found myself a member, or which for any other reason laid claim to be taken as an authority. This silent consensus had informed me, both at the lycée and at the university, that one shouldn't bother worrying about what was really meant when using a term like "volume," which was "obviously self-evident," "generally known," "unproblematic," etc....It is in this gesture of "going beyond," to be something in oneself rather than the pawn of a consensus, the refusal to stay within a rigid circle that others have drawn around one—it is in this solitary act that one finds true creativity. All others things follow as a matter of course.

Since then I've had the chance, in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my "elders" and among young people in my general age group, who were much more brilliant, much more "gifted" than I was. I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle—while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things that I had to learn (so I was assured), things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end. Indeed, there was little about me that identified the kind of bright student who wins at prestigious competitions or assimilates, almost by sleight of hand, the most forbidding subjects.

In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still, from the perspective of thirty or thirty-five years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They've all done things, often beautiful things, in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they've remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have had to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birthright, as it was mine: the capacity to be alone."

[1] Quote translation found in [2] from Alexander Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles, 1986, English translation by Roy Lisker, www.grothendieck-circle.org, chapter 2.

[2] Smolin, Lee - The Trouble with Physics

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