{"id":1481,"date":"2009-01-02T12:46:55","date_gmt":"2009-01-02T17:46:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=1481"},"modified":"2018-02-03T08:45:48","modified_gmt":"2018-02-03T13:45:48","slug":"dis-moi-qui-tu-aimes-je-te-dirai-que-tu-hais","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=1481","title":{"rendered":"Dis-moi qui tu aimes (je te dirai qui tu hais)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A colleague has very helpfully provided me with a copy of the murder mystery set at the IHES that I wrote about recently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=1443\">here<\/a>, and I&#8217;ve just finished reading it.   Since I&#8217;m not much of an afficionado of this genre of fiction, I can&#8217;t really evaluate how good a murder mystery it is.  But as a memoir of the IHES during the 1980s, it is excellent.  A claim at the beginning of the book that &#8220;any resemblance to real persons is just coincidence&#8221; seems to be one of the few things in it (besides the murder) that is fiction.   As far as I can tell, the descriptions of all characters correspond precisely to someone at the IHES during that period, with only the names changed. I&#8217;m guessing that all or most of the anecdotes about these characters also correspond to reality.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a roman a clef, so here&#8217;s the key for the major characters:<\/p>\n<p>Andre Grusin = Leon Motchane<br \/>\nHenrik Dekker = Nicolaas Kuiper<br \/>\nCharles Bouleaux = Marcel Berger<br \/>\nAntoine Fleuret = Alain Connes<br \/>\nJacob Zuram = Barry Mazur<br \/>\nBoris Grekov = Mikhael Gromov<br \/>\nJacques Chevalier = Pierre Deligne<\/p>\n<p>Among the minor characters, I suspect<\/p>\n<p>Joe Bub = Dennis Sullivan<br \/>\nDavid Amir =  Ofer Gabber<br \/>\nAlbert Toudy = Adrien Douady<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ll be giving away too much of the plot to mention that, since the novel was written nearly twenty years ago, back when string theory was a  hot topic, one of the plot twists involves string theory. There&#8217;s a discovery that &#8220;superstring theory is renormalizable and predicts that gluonic interactions are colorless&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A colleague has very helpfully provided me with a copy of the murder mystery set at the IHES that I wrote about recently here, and I&#8217;ve just finished reading it. Since I&#8217;m not much of an afficionado of this genre &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=1481\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"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\/1481","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=1481"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1861,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1481\/revisions\/1861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}