> One striking characteristic of Grothendieck's mode of thinking is that it seemed to rely so little on examples. This can be seen in the legend of the so-called "Grothendieck prime". In a mathematical conversation, someone suggested to Grothendieck that they should consider a particular prime number. "You mean an actual number?" Grothendieck asked. The other person replied, yes, an actual prime number. Grothendieck suggested, "All right, take 57."
It looks like a prime, but can be caught with the second-simplest test: sum of the digits is 12, which is divisible by 3. Hence it's divisible by 3.
(The simplest test being of course if the number is even and bigger than 2)
Edit: now that I think about it, probably should not have tried to impose ordering to the simplicity of tests. There's of course the divisibility by 5 test, which is even simpler.
If anyone's interested in Grothendieck's writing, which is primarily in French, I threw his "Séminaires de Géométrie Algébrique" (SGA, Algebraic Geometry Seminars) and "Éléments de Géométrie Algébrique" (EGA, Elements of Algebraic Geometry) into an LLM to translate it to English. It's spotty in some sections, so I intend to do another pass, but it's better than my remedial French.
all mention of aekjeot (fish sauce) and saeujeot (tiny shrimp) seems to be elided here. kimchi in coastal regions (and most commercialized korean kimchi) has a strong tendency to have that in, so if you take grothendieck's recipe as is, you won't have the exported korean taste. northern kimchis have diverged materially in addition, due to north korea being fucked up. aekjeot you can just add but the procedure to add saeujeot traditionally is pretty fiddly
he mentions using whatever herbs he had in a european setting like juniper and rosemary but the canonical herb to add is korean chives and dropwort. never seen juniper or rosemary, frankly.
he does mention that the pepper is a specific variety in korea without exception. this is the korean chili, sun-dried and flaked. it's a very distinctive varietal, the taste will be very different without it
That book is fiction with a factual veneer. I liked it a lot until I started realizing that many of the details were made up. Then I couldn't read any more. It was like when TwoSetViolin described what it was like for them to watch movies with musician characters played, unrealistically, by non-musician actors. You'd be watching the perfectly fine movie until you noticed that the bananas were blue instead of yellow, with nobody mentioning it. After that the movie made no sense any more.
I hated the movie Oppenheimer for the same reason.
Definitely, but do check the link.. I dug it up originally by trying to track down detail about the nonfiction background that the book is pulling from. Seems like the best short source, but I'd love to hear recs for a good biography. The autobiography that Groth is careful to say is not an autobiography is on my shelf and also in pdf form. Haven't read it yet, but I'm not sure it's the type of thing that's going to cover the descent into madness properly.
I read and enjoyed that book out of a general interest in the history of ideas, but admit I am not able to judge the underlying mathematics. Is the "fiction" part only related to descriptions of his mathematical contributions, or are there problems with the biographical information as well?
Interestingly, von Neumann's daughter was kind of shocked by the research the author did for the book The MANIAC; as a kid she carried graph paper in her pocket and Labatut had somehow found this out in his research and put it into the book, really blew her away I guess.
Field medals are still handed out to people who deign to look upon his prophetic ramblings. I'm half-convinced the religious stuff probably unveils the geometric structure of the universe.
One of my favourite Grothendieck stories from <https://www.ams.org/notices/200410/fea-grothendieck-part2.pd...>:
> One striking characteristic of Grothendieck's mode of thinking is that it seemed to rely so little on examples. This can be seen in the legend of the so-called "Grothendieck prime". In a mathematical conversation, someone suggested to Grothendieck that they should consider a particular prime number. "You mean an actual number?" Grothendieck asked. The other person replied, yes, an actual prime number. Grothendieck suggested, "All right, take 57."
I had to follow your link to get it: I hadn't realized that 57 is not prime. At least I'm in good company.
It looks like a prime, but can be caught with the second-simplest test: sum of the digits is 12, which is divisible by 3. Hence it's divisible by 3.
(The simplest test being of course if the number is even and bigger than 2)
Edit: now that I think about it, probably should not have tried to impose ordering to the simplicity of tests. There's of course the divisibility by 5 test, which is even simpler.
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It's referred to as the Grothendieck Prime for this reason.
Take 111 as an example.
27 is a Tao prime. Terence Tao suggested 27 was a prime number on The Colbert Report in 2014. He was likely very nervous.
If anyone's interested in Grothendieck's writing, which is primarily in French, I threw his "Séminaires de Géométrie Algébrique" (SGA, Algebraic Geometry Seminars) and "Éléments de Géométrie Algébrique" (EGA, Elements of Algebraic Geometry) into an LLM to translate it to English. It's spotty in some sections, so I intend to do another pass, but it's better than my remedial French.
EGA: https://github.com/jcreinhold/ega (https://jcreinhold.github.io/ega/)
SGA: https://github.com/jcreinhold/sga (https://jcreinhold.github.io/sga/)
I maintain a website of scans of things Grothendieck wrote, pictures, etc. https://wstein.org/sga/
For anyone interested in Grothendieck's opinions on kimchi …
https://mikepierce.github.io/grothendieck-kimchi/translation...
all mention of aekjeot (fish sauce) and saeujeot (tiny shrimp) seems to be elided here. kimchi in coastal regions (and most commercialized korean kimchi) has a strong tendency to have that in, so if you take grothendieck's recipe as is, you won't have the exported korean taste. northern kimchis have diverged materially in addition, due to north korea being fucked up. aekjeot you can just add but the procedure to add saeujeot traditionally is pretty fiddly
he mentions using whatever herbs he had in a european setting like juniper and rosemary but the canonical herb to add is korean chives and dropwort. never seen juniper or rosemary, frankly.
he does mention that the pepper is a specific variety in korea without exception. this is the korean chili, sun-dried and flaked. it's a very distinctive varietal, the taste will be very different without it
Happy to see that it's got the obligatory monk/wizard photo.
For more life and times stuff I also suggest Labatut's Cease to Understand the World book and https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/konstantinos-foutzop...
That book is fiction with a factual veneer. I liked it a lot until I started realizing that many of the details were made up. Then I couldn't read any more. It was like when TwoSetViolin described what it was like for them to watch movies with musician characters played, unrealistically, by non-musician actors. You'd be watching the perfectly fine movie until you noticed that the bananas were blue instead of yellow, with nobody mentioning it. After that the movie made no sense any more.
I hated the movie Oppenheimer for the same reason.
> That book is fiction with a factual veneer.
Definitely, but do check the link.. I dug it up originally by trying to track down detail about the nonfiction background that the book is pulling from. Seems like the best short source, but I'd love to hear recs for a good biography. The autobiography that Groth is careful to say is not an autobiography is on my shelf and also in pdf form. Haven't read it yet, but I'm not sure it's the type of thing that's going to cover the descent into madness properly.
https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/slaoui/notes/recoltes_et_sem...
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Very interested in reading your list of blue bananas in Oppenheimer.
I read and enjoyed that book out of a general interest in the history of ideas, but admit I am not able to judge the underlying mathematics. Is the "fiction" part only related to descriptions of his mathematical contributions, or are there problems with the biographical information as well?
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Interestingly, von Neumann's daughter was kind of shocked by the research the author did for the book The MANIAC; as a kid she carried graph paper in her pocket and Labatut had somehow found this out in his research and put it into the book, really blew her away I guess.
Field medals are still handed out to people who deign to look upon his prophetic ramblings. I'm half-convinced the religious stuff probably unveils the geometric structure of the universe.
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