{"id":13013,"date":"2022-12-30T13:17:53","date_gmt":"2022-12-30T18:17:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=13013"},"modified":"2022-12-30T13:17:53","modified_gmt":"2022-12-30T18:17:53","slug":"pierre-schapira-on-recoltes-et-semailles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=13013","title":{"rendered":"Pierre Schapira on R\u00e9coltes et Semailles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this year I bought a copy of the recently published version<\/a> of Grothendieck’s R\u00e9coltes et Semailles<\/em>, and spent quite a lot of time reading it. I wrote a bit about it here<\/a>, intended to write something much longer when I finished reading, but I’ve given up on that idea. At some point this past fall I stopped reading, having made it through all but 100 pages or so of the roughly 1900 total. I planned to pick it up again and finish, but haven’t managed to bring myself to do that, largely because getting to the end would mean I should write something, and the task of doing justice to this text looks far too difficult.<\/p>\n

R\u00e9coltes et Semailles<\/em> is a unique and amazing document, some of the things in it are fantastic and wonderful. Quoting myself from earlier this year<\/p>\n

there are many beautifully written sections, capturing Grothendieck\u2019s feeling for the beauty of the deepest ideas in mathematics. One gets to see what it looked like from the inside to a genius as he worked, often together with others, on a project that revolutionized how we think about mathematics. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A huge problem with the book is the way it was written, providing a convincing advertisement for word processors. Grothendieck seems to have not significantly edited the manuscript. When he thought of something relevant to what he had written previously, instead of editing that, he would just type away and add more material. Unclear how this could ever happen, but it would be a great service to humanity to have a competent editor put to work doing a huge rewrite of the text.<\/p>\n

The other problem though is even more serious. The text provides deep personal insight into Grothendieck’s thinking, which is simultaneously fascinating and discouraging. His isolation and decision to concentrate on “meditation” about himself left him semi-paranoid and without anyone to engage with and help channel his remarkable intellect. It’s frustrating to read hundreds of pages about motives which consist of some tantalizing explanations of these deep mathematical ideas, embedded in endless complaints that Deligne and others didn’t properly understand and develop these ideas (or properly credit him). One keeps thinking: instead of going on like this, why didn’t he just do what he said he had planned earlier, write out an explanation of these ideas?<\/p>\n

As an excuse for giving up on writing more myself about this, I can instead recommend Pierre Schapira’s new article at Inference, entitled A Truncated Manuscript<\/a>. Schapira provides an excellent review of the book, and also explains a major problem with it. Grothendieck devotes endless pages to complaints that Zoghman Mebkhout did not get sufficient recognition for his work on the so-called Riemann-Hilbert correspondence for perverse sheaves. Mebkhout was Schapira’s student, and he explains that a correct version of the story has the ideas involved originating with Kashiwara, who was the one who should have gotten more recognition, not Mebhkout. According to Schapira, he explained what had really happened to Grothendieck, who wrote an extra twenty pages or so correcting mistaken claims in R\u00e9coltes et Semailles<\/em>, but these didn’t make it into the recently published version. If someone ever gets to the project of editing R\u00e9coltes et Semailles<\/em>, a good starting point would be to simply delete all of the material that Grothendieck included on this topic.<\/p>\n

The extra pages described are available now here<\/a>, as part of an extensive website called the Grothendieck Circle<\/a>, now being updated by Leila Schneps. For a wealth of material concerning Grothendieck’s writings, see this site run by Mateo Carmona<\/a>. It includes a transcription of R\u00e9coltes et Semailles<\/em><\/a> that provides an alternative to the recently published version.<\/p>\n

The Schapira article is a good example of some of the excellent pieces that the people at Inference have published since they started nearly ten years ago (another example relevant to Grothendieck would be Pierre Cartier’s A Country Known Only by Name<\/a> from their first issue). I’ve heard news that they have lost a major part of their funding, which was reportedly from Peter Thiel and was one source of controversy about the magazine. I wrote about this here in early 2019<\/a> (also note discussion in the comments). My position then and now is that the concerns people had about the editors and funding of Inference needed to be evaluated in the context of the result, which was an unusual publication putting out some high quality articles about math and physics that would likely not have otherwise gotten written and published. I hope they manage to find alternate sources of funding that allow them to keep putting out the publication. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this year I bought a copy of the recently published version of Grothendieck’s R\u00e9coltes et Semailles, and spent quite a lot of time reading it. I wrote a bit about it here, intended to write something much longer when … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13013"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13281,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13013\/revisions\/13281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}