There are a lot of Grothendieck's writings at http://grothendieckcircle.org/ . If you have stuff that they don't, maybe you could share with them?
I didn't realize that there was so much stuff unavailable til now. I remember reading that he burned a 55 gallon drum full of papers to the dismay of some of his admirers. I figured anything he wrote by now was either online or destroyed.
I suspect this more recently revealed stuff can't be published for various reasons, such as crazy personal attacks on other mathematicians. Some of the older stuff had some of that.
Récoltes et Semmailes (Reapings and Sowings, a big semi-autobiographical rant) is online in French and partially translated to English. It might give you an idea of what you are getting into. At the time I tried to read parts of it, machine translation wasn't as good as it is now. So maybe I can try again with DeepL or something.
On HN, reposts don't count as duplicates unless the article has had significant attention (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). That one hadn't, so this one doesn't.
The reason for this is that we want good submissions to get multiple chances at getting attention, i.e. to mitigate the randomness of what achieves liftoff from /newest.
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.
It can be engineered. It has already begun. Whenever you experience some kind of synchronicity in an ad that looks as if it had read your mind, because you thought about the same thing a few hours before, the algorithm is optimizing what may be relevant to you – relevancy of which you know almost nothing in the bigger picture of the life process you're embedded in.
Give AI a few centuries of development and integration and we may live in a providential future.
> Six years ago, Afonso Bandeira and Shuyang Ling were attempting to come up with a better way to discern clusters in enormous data sets when they stumbled into a surreal world. Ling realized that the equations they’d come up with were, unexpectedly, a perfect match for a mathematical model of spontaneous synchronization. Spontaneous synchronization is a phenomenon in which oscillators, which might take the form of pendulums, springs, human heart cells or fireflies, end up moving in lockstep without any central coordination mechanism.
The evidence would seem to suggest Newton belongs in this group too, and I suspect many others beyond that.
The modern mathematical and scientific establishments seem to have a big problem with the fundamental truth that many of the giants on whose shoulders they stand achieved their stature by also exploring lots of wildly unorthodox aspects of the human condition. They wish this stuff could be consigned to history, but in reality we rely on such things for progress.
Adding to this list of unorthodox approaches, by modern standards: I've heard in some French conferences of Etienne Klein (I'm not sure how romanticized this is though) that Einstein had some breakthrough while being in a half-asleep state.
Here's another similar instance[0][1], better documented, of an engineer working on an automatic level recorder, and "realizing" in a dream that it could be used to improve the accuracy of anti-aircraft guns (WWII).
• Friedrich August Kekulé: The renowned German chemist, Kekulé was responsible for discovering the ring structure of benzene. In a dream, he saw a snake biting its own tail, which inspired him to propose the cyclic structure of the benzene molecule.
• Otto Loewi: Loewi's dream eventually won him a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of chemical neurotransmission. In his dream, he visualized an experiment that would later prove that the transmission of nerve impulses is chemical, not electrical.
• Dmitri Mendeleev: As you mentioned, Mendeleev is known for his contribution to the development of the periodic table. The idea for organizing the elements by atomic weight and properties came to him in a dream.
• Elias Howe: The U.S. inventor of the sewing machine, Elias Howe, was struggling to design the needle mechanism. One night, he dreamt of being captured by hostile tribesmen who used spears with holes close to their pointed tips. This dream inspired him to design the sewing machine needle with the hole near the point instead of the blunt end.
• Frederick Banting: was actually inspired by a dream which led to the discovery of insulin. In his dream, he envisioned a method to isolate the hormone and subsequently treat diabetes. Banting's pioneering work on insulin ultimately earned him a Nobel Prize and has saved countless lives since.
• René Descartes: The French philosopher and mathematician is said to have experienced a series of dreams that profoundly influenced his work. One of these dreams led him to develop the idea of analytical geometry and Cartesian coordinates, which laid the foundation for modern mathematics.
• Niels Bohr: The Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr is credited for his groundbreaking work in atomic structure and quantum mechanics. Bohr had a dream about a horse race, where the horses seemed to be placed in both continuous and discontinuous orbits around the track. This dream inspired his idea that electrons could only reside in specific orbits around the atom's nucleus.
• James Watson: Co-discoverer of the DNA double-helix structure, Watson reported a dream that helped him make the connection between nucleotide bases, leading him and Francis Crick to propose the complementary base pair structure of DNA.
One can only "dream" what would happen in a few decades, if instead of having kids memorizing multiplication tables, we would have them memorize such facts about the history of science.
Considering dreams are essentially natural hallucinations, one wonders about the impact of modern psychedelics. A few hundred years hence, would a similar list have many entries reflecting psychedelic inspiration?
Another eccentric french scientist, Jean-Pierre Petit, was one of his rare visitor (they shared the same antimilitarist views, and became friend after his exile).
He wrote a brief story about the context of his withdrawal away from society:
This chapter expresses the meaning and the importance of dreams and the author’s empirical conviction that dreams are sent by an outside force, called “le Rêveur”, who knows each of us intimately and sends dreams in order for each of us to know himself fully. Although all dreams are message, he signals the existence of particularly powerful ones which should act as a call, and warns against the inertia (fear of change) which prevents the dreamer from the meaning contained in it.
The question “where do dreams come from” is essential here. Grothendieck examines notions that our languages contain about “gifts”, or the expressions “ajouter foi” or “Glauben schenken” which indicate that our languages actually contain the idea that things come to us from some outside source. He describes how he himself wondered what part of dreams come from outside (as gifts) and what part from reflexes of our own psyches, impulses etc. He anticipates by telling us that he reached the final conclusion that dreams are entirely and completely messages sent to us by the Dreamer to indicate fundamental truths about ourselves (which we may ignore or not as we wish).
In 2006-2007 a lot of external and internal events happened to me, after which my point of view on the questions of the "supernatural" has changed significantly. What happened to me during these years, perhaps, can be compared most closely to what happened to Karl Jung in 1913-14. Jung called it "confrontation with the unconscious". I do not know what to call it, but I can describe it in a few words. Remaining more or less normal, apart from the fact that I was trying to discuss what was happening to me with people whom I should not have discussed with, I had in a few months acquired a very considerable experience of visions, voices, periods when parts of my body did not obey me and a lot of incredible accidents. The most intense period was in mid-April 2007 when I spent 9 days (7 of them in the Mormon capital of Salt Lake City), never falling asleep for all these days.
[...]
I did not go crazy, although sometimes there were "drifts" when I began to seriously believe in this or that "theory". As a rule, these drifts straightened quickly, usually in a few hours. More serious were periods of hopelessness. In such periods, the idea that it is necessary to continue fighting is very helpful, because from this, albeit to a small extent, depends in which spiritual world today's children will live.
[...]
- You said that you were offered pictures of the world. And, as far as I understand, it all evolved that it was a metaphysical scam. You broke through the layers of "explanations", realizing that certain manipulations with consciousness are taking place, that someone is building up whole philosophical systems inside you, and this happens as an invasion from the outside. So? - It is difficult to build a real philosophical ...
18 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadI didn't realize that there was so much stuff unavailable til now. I remember reading that he burned a 55 gallon drum full of papers to the dismay of some of his admirers. I figured anything he wrote by now was either online or destroyed.
I suspect this more recently revealed stuff can't be published for various reasons, such as crazy personal attacks on other mathematicians. Some of the older stuff had some of that.
Récoltes et Semmailes (Reapings and Sowings, a big semi-autobiographical rant) is online in French and partially translated to English. It might give you an idea of what you are getting into. At the time I tried to read parts of it, machine translation wasn't as good as it is now. So maybe I can try again with DeepL or something.
Although the handwriting in some of the documents looks challenging to read, e.g: https://grothendieck.umontpellier.fr/web/viewer.html?file=.....
The reason for this is that we want good submissions to get multiple chances at getting attention, i.e. to mitigate the randomness of what achieves liftoff from /newest.
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.
Give AI a few centuries of development and integration and we may live in a providential future.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-proof-shows-that-expander...
> Six years ago, Afonso Bandeira and Shuyang Ling were attempting to come up with a better way to discern clusters in enormous data sets when they stumbled into a surreal world. Ling realized that the equations they’d come up with were, unexpectedly, a perfect match for a mathematical model of spontaneous synchronization. Spontaneous synchronization is a phenomenon in which oscillators, which might take the form of pendulums, springs, human heart cells or fireflies, end up moving in lockstep without any central coordination mechanism.
The modern mathematical and scientific establishments seem to have a big problem with the fundamental truth that many of the giants on whose shoulders they stand achieved their stature by also exploring lots of wildly unorthodox aspects of the human condition. They wish this stuff could be consigned to history, but in reality we rely on such things for progress.
Here's another similar instance[0][1], better documented, of an engineer working on an automatic level recorder, and "realizing" in a dream that it could be used to improve the accuracy of anti-aircraft guns (WWII).
[0]: https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/parkinsons_dream...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgF3OX8nT0w
https://dodona.be/en/activities/1633022739/
• Otto Loewi: Loewi's dream eventually won him a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of chemical neurotransmission. In his dream, he visualized an experiment that would later prove that the transmission of nerve impulses is chemical, not electrical.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4291908/
• Dmitri Mendeleev: As you mentioned, Mendeleev is known for his contribution to the development of the periodic table. The idea for organizing the elements by atomic weight and properties came to him in a dream.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/02/08/mendeleev-periodic...
• Elias Howe: The U.S. inventor of the sewing machine, Elias Howe, was struggling to design the needle mechanism. One night, he dreamt of being captured by hostile tribesmen who used spears with holes close to their pointed tips. This dream inspired him to design the sewing machine needle with the hole near the point instead of the blunt end.
https://nomadicschool.org/writings/breakthroughs-and-dreams-...
• Frederick Banting: was actually inspired by a dream which led to the discovery of insulin. In his dream, he envisioned a method to isolate the hormone and subsequently treat diabetes. Banting's pioneering work on insulin ultimately earned him a Nobel Prize and has saved countless lives since.
https://lisashea.com/lisabase/dreams/inspirations/insulin.ht...
• René Descartes: The French philosopher and mathematician is said to have experienced a series of dreams that profoundly influenced his work. One of these dreams led him to develop the idea of analytical geometry and Cartesian coordinates, which laid the foundation for modern mathematics.
https://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors/descarte.htm
• Niels Bohr: The Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr is credited for his groundbreaking work in atomic structure and quantum mechanics. Bohr had a dream about a horse race, where the horses seemed to be placed in both continuous and discontinuous orbits around the track. This dream inspired his idea that electrons could only reside in specific orbits around the atom's nucleus.
https://lisashea.com/lisabase/dreams/inspirations/bohr.html
• James Watson: Co-discoverer of the DNA double-helix structure, Watson reported a dream that helped him make the connection between nucleotide bases, leading him and Francis Crick to propose the complementary base pair structure of DNA.
https://blog.genleap.co/the-shape-of-dna-was-inspired-by-dre...
• Benoît d...
Fascinating.
He wrote a brief story about the context of his withdrawal away from society:
https://www.jp-petit.org/Nouvelles/Grothendieck.htm
https://pastebin.com/7y2pbsMb (the translation)
Focusing on his "crackpot beliefs"
https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/grothendieckcircl...
This chapter expresses the meaning and the importance of dreams and the author’s empirical conviction that dreams are sent by an outside force, called “le Rêveur”, who knows each of us intimately and sends dreams in order for each of us to know himself fully. Although all dreams are message, he signals the existence of particularly powerful ones which should act as a call, and warns against the inertia (fear of change) which prevents the dreamer from the meaning contained in it.
The question “where do dreams come from” is essential here. Grothendieck examines notions that our languages contain about “gifts”, or the expressions “ajouter foi” or “Glauben schenken” which indicate that our languages actually contain the idea that things come to us from some outside source. He describes how he himself wondered what part of dreams come from outside (as gifts) and what part from reflexes of our own psyches, impulses etc. He anticipates by telling us that he reached the final conclusion that dreams are entirely and completely messages sent to us by the Dreamer to indicate fundamental truths about ourselves (which we may ignore or not as we wish).
Full text in french: http://cm2vivi2002.free.fr/AG-biblio/AG-clesonges.pdf
Voevodsky's last interview
In 2006-2007 a lot of external and internal events happened to me, after which my point of view on the questions of the "supernatural" has changed significantly. What happened to me during these years, perhaps, can be compared most closely to what happened to Karl Jung in 1913-14. Jung called it "confrontation with the unconscious". I do not know what to call it, but I can describe it in a few words. Remaining more or less normal, apart from the fact that I was trying to discuss what was happening to me with people whom I should not have discussed with, I had in a few months acquired a very considerable experience of visions, voices, periods when parts of my body did not obey me and a lot of incredible accidents. The most intense period was in mid-April 2007 when I spent 9 days (7 of them in the Mormon capital of Salt Lake City), never falling asleep for all these days.
[...]
I did not go crazy, although sometimes there were "drifts" when I began to seriously believe in this or that "theory". As a rule, these drifts straightened quickly, usually in a few hours. More serious were periods of hopelessness. In such periods, the idea that it is necessary to continue fighting is very helpful, because from this, albeit to a small extent, depends in which spiritual world today's children will live.
[...]
- You said that you were offered pictures of the world. And, as far as I understand, it all evolved that it was a metaphysical scam. You broke through the layers of "explanations", realizing that certain manipulations with consciousness are taking place, that someone is building up whole philosophical systems inside you, and this happens as an invasion from the outside. So? - It is difficult to build a real philosophical ...