The n-Category Café

It may be of interest to note that an abridged version of Honigs’ account had appeared in the March 2016 issue of the Notices of the AMS.

Am I alone in finding this story kind of unsettling? I am glad that the incident seems to have turned out comparatively well, but surely not curiosity, nor burnout, nor an urge to “demystify” can justify this urge to intrusion into anyone’s life, let alone someone who so determinedly communicated his desire for privacy as Grothendieck. Even granted that the author didn’t know that Grothendieck had explicitly denied her requests to visit, surely lack of denial cannot be regarded as permission?

I don’t mean this as an attack on the author—who among us has not done something as a graduate student that now seems kind of ill advised (no pun intended)?—but rather as a suggestion that perhaps this story shouldn’t have been told publicly, or have got the wide currency that a Notices publication gives it. On the other hand, I know Grothendieck even less than the author does, so perhaps I am off base.

Readers might find themselves lamenting the lost conversation: what could have been discussed but never was. Could they not have mentioned the Grothendieck construction, the Grothendieck group, the Grothendieck–Riemann–Roch theorem, the Grothendieck fibration, the Grothendieck existence theorem, or any one of his scores of other discoveries? No doubt. But the ultimate construction — and hence the ultimate lost conversation — was given by Grothendieck’s mother, who made the Grothendieck Grothendieck.