[HN Gopher] Hermit 'scribblings' of Alexander Grothendieck made ...
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Hermit 'scribblings' of Alexander Grothendieck made available to
researchers
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 62 points
Date : 2023-10-01 12:18 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| momirlan wrote:
| Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37712485
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| HerculePoirot wrote:
| 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:
|
| 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 Reveur", 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 system solely on the
| basis of external influences. From the outside (not
| understandable to me by the way) come "seeds" short ideas,
| associations, etc. In the vast majority of cases, what of these
| seeds grows, if they are allowed to grow freely, is useless or
| harmful. Somehow I sounded for such systems the interesting name
| "harness". Those. what can be used later to direct human
| behavior. Whether a person allows these seeds to grow or quickly
| culls depends largely on their skills of working with their inner
| world. The problem is aggravated by the fact that sometimes the
| appearance of such "seeds" is accompanied by other phenomena, not
| of a mental, but of an emotional or even real plan, which seem to
| confirm the system that is starting to form. Another important
| property of these seeds and growing systems is that they, as a
| rule, contain, especially at the initial stage, really true and
| interesting ideas. The transition from the truth to the lies in
| these systems is often difficult to notice. A person develops an
| instinctive confidence in the emerging thought stream, then he
| begins to believe in its continuation which is already false, and
| then it is difficult for him to admit to himself that he believed
| in bullshit and he begins to deceive himself just to not feel
| fools. Often systems are built in such a way that starting from a
| certain level of growth, they support themselves also through
| fear.
|
| This is reminescent of Saussure (the linguist), who held the
| notion of identity in a way that is reminescent of the univalence
| axiom:
|
| http://www.revue-texto.net/docannexe/file/116/saussure255_6....
|
| He delved into rather esoteric topics too.
| https://journals.openedition.org/linx/671
|
| The anagrammatic nature of the research: words under words
|
| Here we must start with an example. They abound. I will take one
| more or less at random. It is again a Saturnian verse. It is
| extracted from a particularly archaic text, a "vaticinium" -
| "oracle" - which, according to tradition, dates back to the
| beginning of the 4th century BC, precisely to the year 396. It is
| a response addressed to the Romans by the oracle of Delphi, at
| the end of the interminable siege of the Etruscan city of Veii:
| the god Apollo announces the Romans' victory, and demands the
| offerings that are due to him. This "vaticinium" is quoted, three
| and a half centuries later, by Livy, in a modernized form.
| Saussure, an excellent connoisseur of Latin history, restores one
| form to the oracle that he believes is closer to the one it had
| in 396. One of the verses > has, in this reconstructed archaic
| Latin, the following form:
|
| DONOM AMPLOM VICTOR AD MEA TEMPLA PORTATO
|
| ("Let the victorious [general] bring an important offering to my
| temples")
|
| Saussure successively analyzes each of the two hemistichs of this
| Saturnian verse. He observes that the phonemes of each of these
| two hemistichs repeat the phonemes of the name of the god APOLLO,
| in the nominative case, and in its archaic form, with only one >
| -L-.
|
| First hemistich: donom AmPLOm victOr A PLO O
|
| Second hemistich: ad meA temPLa pOrtatO A PL O O
|
| Thus, although the name of the god is absent in its complete
| linear form in each of the two hemistichs of the verse, it is
| nevertheless present through each of its phonemes. I would like
| to draw attention to an extremely frequent phenomenon, which
| poses heavy difficulties for Saussure: the phonemes of the
| anagrammatized name (the "theme," then the "word-theme,"
| sometimes rivalled by "word-type" in Saussure's terminology)
| appear on the surface of the verse in disorder. I will come back
| to this problem in part 7, > specifically devoted to questioning
| the linear nature of the signifier.
|
| [...]
|
| To find linguistic elements belonging to other grammatical
| classes, one must turn to less frequent cases: cases where the
| "cryptogram" - that's the name given to it in this case - takes
| the form of what I call a micronarrative. The most spectacular
| case is that of the "vaticinium" reported by Livy, which has
| already been studied from another point of view in part 3. This
| "vaticinium" spans eleven Saturnian verses, as we have seen
| before, and therefore quite long: from about twelve to fifteen
| syllables. This set of verses, totaling about a hundred
| syllables, contains as a cryptogram a narrative > obviously much
| briefer than Saussure restores as follows:
|
| Ave Camille Ave Marce Fouri Emperator Dictator ex Veieis
| Triump(h)abis. Oracolom Putias Delp(h)icas (Starobinski, p. 78)
|
| I translate this archaic Latin, both phonetically and
| morphologically:
|
| "Greetings, Camillus, greetings, Marcus Furius, commander-in-
| chief. As dictator following your victory at Veii, you will
| triumph. Such is the oracle of the Pythia of > Delphi."
|
| This is what I call a micronarrative. It necessarily includes
| words from several linguistic classes: proper nouns and common
| nouns, as we have already encountered, but also a verb conjugated
| in a personal form (triump(h)abis), an adjective (Delp(h)icas), a
| > preposition (ex), and the interjection ave.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Pity there are no images of his 'scribblings'.
| anthonygarcia21 wrote:
| Some of the material appears to be here:
| https://grothendieck.umontpellier.fr/archives-grothendieck/
|
| Although the handwriting in some of the documents looks
| challenging to read, e.g:
| https://grothendieck.umontpellier.fr/web/viewer.html?file=.....
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Ok, so 'scribblings' was a fairly accurate description!
| jimmy76615 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Every sentence born in pain.
| fidotron wrote:
| 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.
| mbivert wrote:
| 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).
|
| [0]: https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/parkinsons_d
| ream...
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgF3OX8nT0w
| HerculePoirot wrote:
| * Friedrich August Kekule: The renowned German chemist,
| Kekule 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.
|
| 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.h
| t...
|
| * Rene 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...
|
| * Benoit de Maillet: In the early 18th-century, French
| diplomat and naturalist Benoit de Maillet made notable
| contributions to earth sciences. Inspired by a dream about
| his great scientific destiny, he wrote the manuscript
| "Telliamed," exploring the Earth's history and suggesting
| it was once underwater. His ideas on subsidence laid the
| groundwork for future geological research.
|
| https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3AMaillet_-
| _Telliamed%2C...
|
| * Srinivasa Ramanujan: Indian mathematician Srinivasa
| Ramanujan, known for his impact on mathematical analysis
| and number theory, claimed divine inspiration for his ideas
| through dreams. The Hindu goddess Namagiri Thayar presented
| him with mathematical formulae in his dreams, resulting in
| novel discoveries. Ramanujan's intuitive and profound work
| continues to influence mathematicians today.
|
| https://thesublimeblog.org/2022/08/09/it-came-to-me-in-a-
| dre...
|
| * Alfred Russel Wallace: The British naturalist and
| biologist, who independently conceived the theory of
| evolution through natural selection, is said to have been
| inspired by a fever-induced dream. This dream helped him to
| visualize the process of selection, ultimately leading him
| to co-present the theory of evolution with Charles Darwin.
|
| https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/alfred-
| wal...
| mbivert wrote:
| 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.
|
| Fascinating.
| HerculePoirot wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| williamstein wrote:
| I wish it was all online. I have long hosted scans of
| Grothendieck's mathematics at https://wstein.org/sga/
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Recoltes 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.
| pablomalo wrote:
| Recoltes et semailles ;)
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