Abstract

No mathematician did more to change mathematics in the second half of the twentieth century than Alexandre Grothendieck. This would have been true even if he had been a quiet figure with a liking for playing the piano and walking in the hills but, as this book makes very clear, he was far from that, and his character and his way of working enhanced his impact. Above all, there was his abrupt departure from the world of mathematics in 1970 and his occasional interventions in it since.This review was submitted a few days before Grothendieck's death in November 2014—Editor.As a teenager, Grothendieck had lived with his mother protected from the Nazis by courageous Huguenots in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Immediately after the war, he went to the University of Montpellier where he studied mathematics and soon made his way to Nancy and was introduced to Dieudonné and Schwartz, who were members of Bourbaki. His first original work was in the theory of Banach spaces where, in the wo ..