Subject: categories: Re: Grothendieck bio?

From: Robin Houston <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2004 11:12:43 +0100

On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 10:43:59AM -0700, Galchin Vasili wrote:
>    Does anybody know of a Grothendieck biography?

This question came up recently on sci.math.research, where there were
several interesting responses. The thread is at

  http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=0t3t3bw3rrcd%40legacy

Robin

---

From: Robert Knighten <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2004 17:23:23 -0700

Galchin Vasili writes:
 > Hello,
 >
 >    Does anybody know of a Grothendieck biography? For
 > me many times it is helpful to read a bio to the
 > historical development of a person's work.
 >
 > Thanks in advance, Bill Halchin

I'm pretty sure there is no book length biography, but there is some
information at:

http://www.math.jussieu.fr/~leila/biographic.php

which is really the information from www.grothendieck-circle.org which appears
to be off-line at the moment.

-- Bob

--
Robert L. Knighten
[email-masked]

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From: Ronnie Brown <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2004 14:32:03 +0100

People may like to look at the Spectator article:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/spectator/spec262.html

I thought Recollte et Semaille translated as `Reaping and sowing'?

He was a great correspondent in the 1980s, and we have a mass of letters
which will be transferred to an archive in good hands in due course (my
administrative matters have got too much at present). This correspondence
is relevant to Pursuing Stacks, which was written in English as a response
to our correspondence in English, which he describes in `Esquisse d'un
programme' (EdP) as `a baton rompu' (ranging over this and that). In fact
EdP is available in French and English translation in books by Pierre
Lochack and Leila Schneps (LMS Lecture notes series). Pursuing Stacks was
to have been volume 1 of a series on `The long march towards Galois
theory', written in a new informal style, as in Pursuing Stacks, where the
thought is open to view. I suspect that writing R&S distracted him from
this aim.

I expect to explain the correspondence which led to Pursuing Stacks being
sent to me, and Larry Breen, and then circulated from Bangor,  in 1983, but
have not yet got round to it.

In any case, Pursuing Stacks seems to be increasingly influential, as does
EdP.

Ronnie Brown

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