The n-Category Café

Continuing to quote Pachter:

My colleague Edward Frenkel published a brief non-technical obituary about Grothendieck in the New York Times, and perhaps that is what Nature had in mind for its journal as well. But since Nature bills itself as “An international journal, published weekly, with original, groundbreaking research spanning all of the scientific disciplines [emphasis mine]” Mumford assumed the readers of Nature would be interested not only in where Grothendieck was born and died, but in what he actually accomplished in his life, and why he is admired for his mathematics. Here is the beginning excerpt of Mumford’s blog post explaining why he and John Tate (his coauthor for the post) needed to talk about the concept of a scheme in their post:

John Tate and I were asked by Nature magazine to write an obituary for Alexander Grothendieck. Now he is a hero of mine, the person that I met most deserving of the adjective “genius”. I got to know him when he visited Harvard and John, Shurik (as he was known) and I ran a seminar on “Existence theorems”. His devotion to math, his disdain for formality and convention, his openness and what John and others call his naiveté struck a chord with me.

So John and I agreed and wrote the obituary below. Since the readership of Nature were more or less entirely made up of non-mathematicians, it seemed as though our challenge was to try to make some key parts of Grothendieck’s work accessible to such an audience. Obviously the very definition of a scheme is central to nearly all his work, and we also wanted to say something genuine about categories and cohomology.

What they came up with is a short but well-written obituary that is the best I have read about Grothendieck. It is non-technical yet accurate and meaningfully describes, at a high level, what he is revered for and why. Here it is (copied verbatim from David Mumford’s blog)…

Well, at this point I’ll turn you over to that blog article:

• David Mumford, Can one explain schemes to a biologist?

But the rest of Pachter’s article is interesting too. I’ll quote just a bit more:

What biologists should appreciate, what was on offer in Mumford’s obituary, and what mathematicians can deliver to genomics that is special and unique, is the ability to not only generalize, but to do so “correctly”. The mathematician Raoul Bott once reminisced that “Grothendieck was extraordinary as he could play with concepts, and also was prepared to work very hard to make arguments almost tautological.” In other words, what made Grothendieck special was not that he generalized concepts in algebraic geometry to make them more abstract, but that he was able to do so in the right way. What made his insights seemingly tautological at the end of the day, was that he had the “right” way of viewing things and the “right” abstractions in mind. That is what mathematicians can contribute most of all to genomics. Of course sometimes theorems are important, or specific mathematical techniques solve problems and mathematicians are to thank for that. Phylogenetic invariants are important for phylogenetics which in turn is important for comparative genomics which in turn is important for functional genomics which in turn is important for medicine. But it is the the abstract thinking that I think matters most. In other words, I agree with Charles Darwin that mathematicians are endowed with an extra sense… I am not sure exactly what he meant, but it is clear to me that it is the sense that allows for understanding the difference between the “right” way and the “wrong” way to think about something.

Since I’m trying to think about biology these days, this is encouraging. But the story of the huge culture divide is not. It has a less tragic ending than you might think from what you’ve read here so far: a revised version of Mumford and Tate’s obituary was ultimately accepted by Nature.

However, ironically, the accepted version will not be freely available, thanks to Nature’s repressive policies — while the rejected version appears on Mumford’s blog, so you can read that.

Mumford concludes:

The whole thing is a compromise and I don’t want to say Nature is foolish or stupid not to allow more math. The real problem is that such a huge and painful gap has opened up between mathematicians and the rest of the world. I think that Middle and High School math curricula are one large cause of this. If math was introduced as connected to the rest of the world instead of being an isolated exercise, if it was shown to connect to money, to measuring the real world, to physics, chemistry and biology, to optimizing decisions and to writing computer code, fewer students would be turned off. In fact, why not drop separate High School math classes and teach the math as needed in science, civics and business classes? If you think about it, I think you’ll agree that this is not such a crazy idea.