最后的边界

The catalog stops

The last securely dated unit in the BnF sequence reaches July or August 1999. Réflexions sur la Création extends to August; “Gribouillis II” to July. The fonds as a whole is cataloged through 1999. Alexander Grothendieck lived another fifteen years. 11Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF 29093. Fonds Alexandre Grothendieck.

The gap is easy to misread. An archival terminus is not the date on which a person ceased writing, thinking, believing, speaking, or seeing others. It is the endpoint of a particular body of surviving, cataloged material. Grothendieck may have written other pages after 1999; the catalog used here does not establish them. The sentence ends where the evidence does.

For a life accustomed to vast documentary production, fifteen years without a comparable public sequence feels like a vacuum. Biography has standard ways to fill one: recollections by neighbors, reports of visitors, local disputes, descriptions of the house, statements by relatives, and retrospective medical interpretation. Late Grothendieck attracted all of them. Their availability is not the same as their fitness for use.

This chapter adopts a higher threshold because the asymmetry is severe. Grothendieck had withdrawn from public exchange and did not supply a continuous account. People around him did not necessarily consent to become sources. Journalists were rewarded for penetrating secrecy. The more a detail promises access to the “hermit,” the more carefully its provenance and necessity must be tested.

The result is not a blank chapter. The boundary itself had public consequences. It shaped what mathematicians knew, how manuscripts circulated, how editors proceeded, and how Grothendieck intervened in 2010. Those consequences can be narrated without claiming his daily life.

Four documentary posts across fifteen years

The final period can be pictured as a path marked by four posts. The first is the archival endpoint in 1999. The second is Jackson’s 2004 profile, which confirms continuing seclusion and summarizes the known mathematical manuscripts. The third is Grothendieck’s own intervention in 2010. The fourth is the contemporary report of death in 2014. Between them, the record used here is deliberately thin.

Each post comes from a different kind of source. The 1999 date belongs to a later archival catalog. It records what papers survived and how they were arranged, not what was publicly known at the time. The 2004 profile is contemporary journalism in a scholarly mathematical venue, based on interviews and literature. The 2010 declaration is a primary autograph. The 2014 reports rely on institutional and hospital confirmation. 22Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF 29093. Fonds Alexandre Grothendieck; Grothendieck, “Déclaration d’intention de non-publication”; CNRS Le Journal, Disparition d’un génie des mathématiques; Associated Press, “Alexander Grothendieck, Iconic Mathematician, Dies at Age 86,” CBS News, November 14, 2014, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alexander-grothendieck-iconic-mathematician-dies-at-age-86/; Jackson, “As If Summoned from the Void, I,” nos. 9–10.

Combining them requires attention to viewpoint. The BnF catalog did not exist for readers in 1999. A sentence such as “Grothendieck completed volume 42 and then fell silent” would project a later box number into his own experience. He wrote a sequence of papers; archivists later described them as units. The biography may use that description to date survival while keeping its retrospective nature visible. 33Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF 29093. Fonds Alexandre Grothendieck.

Jackson in 2004 could discuss late mathematical manuscripts known through Malgoire and editors. She could not describe the forty-one-volume BnF sequence with the catalog precision available after 2023. The public image of Grothendieck as inactive therefore coexisted with incomplete knowledge of his 1990s production. 44Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF 29093. Fonds Alexandre Grothendieck; Jackson, “As If Summoned from the Void, I,” nos. 9–10.

The 2010 declaration alters the line because it is not an observation made by others. It is Grothendieck acting on the status of his texts. It proves awareness of circulation and edition projects but supplies no comprehensive report on his life since 1999. The temptation to treat any late autograph as a diary must be resisted.

The death reports establish date, age, and hospital. They also record that the cause was withheld. Obituaries add interpretation, but the core event does not need it. The four posts thus move from archive, to profile, to primary intervention, to public record.

This structure is intentionally unlike a year-by-year chronology. Where no reliable event is required for the biography, no event is supplied. A date list filled from weak anecdotes would look fuller while knowing less. The sparse sequence is the accurate shape of the available high-threshold evidence.

It also prevents the late period from becoming one undifferentiated “hermit years” block: the manuscript sequence had an endpoint, public scholarship continued, Grothendieck intervened, and death followed four years later. Even sparse time has internal distinctions.

What was public in 2004

Allyn Jackson’s two-part profile in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society appeared in October and November 2004, while Grothendieck was alive. Its opening said that he had lived in seclusion for over a decade in a remote hamlet in southern France. The profile reconstructed his mathematical career through publications and extensive interviews with mathematicians. It did not offer a transparent chronicle of Lasserre. 55Jackson, “As If Summoned from the Void, I,” nos. 9–10.

This contemporary limit is valuable. By 2004, seclusion was an established public description rather than a label added after death. The mathematical community knew that ordinary contact had ended and that a precise location was not part of the profile. It knew of some late manuscripts through Malgoire and editors but did not possess the BnF’s later component tree for the 1992–1999 corpus.

Jackson’s account demonstrates two ways a life can remain present during physical withdrawal. First, earlier mathematics continued to organize active fields. Mathematicians could discuss schemes, topoi, cohomology, motives, and dessins without current access to their originator. Second, manuscripts could circulate through custodians and editors. Grothendieck’s public absence did not remove his work from collective time.

The profile also illustrates a temptation. When a subject declines participation, others’ memories occupy more space. Former colleagues recall brilliance, generosity, conflict, and abrupt change. Such testimony is indispensable for periods they witnessed. It becomes less reliable when used to infer an unseen present. A memory of Grothendieck in 1965 does not reveal how he experienced a day in 2004.

The responsible baseline is therefore narrow. He remained in Lasserre; he was absent from ordinary public mathematical life; his earlier and some late mathematical writings continued to be read; knowledge of the large Lasserre manuscripts was limited. “Seclusion” summarizes those relations. It does not establish literal absence of all contact. 66Grothendieck, Lettre à L. Illusie; CNRS Le Journal, Disparition d’un génie des mathématiques; Jackson, “As If Summoned from the Void, I,” nos. 9–10.

Mathematics without current access to its author

By 2004, many mathematicians who used Grothendieck’s ideas had never met him. Schemes, étale cohomology, topoi, and derived methods belonged to mathematical education and research independent of his participation. This independence was not a theft from the founder; it was a condition of mathematics becoming collective knowledge.

The situation nevertheless had an unusual emotional and editorial dimension. Grothendieck was alive but unavailable. Histories could not obtain his ordinary cooperation. Editors could not assume consent. Former students had memories and disagreements he would not publicly answer. The absent living subject occupied a different position from a dead historical figure or an active emeritus.

The mathematical work also moved in directions he did not supervise. Anabelian geometry, dessins, higher categories, and homotopical algebra developed through other people’s definitions, proofs, and institutions. Some directions drew explicitly on manuscripts he had circulated; others extended earlier programs. The biography must not narrate every later result as fulfillment of a plan known completely in advance.

This autonomy helps explain the stakes of the 2010 declaration. The community had learned to receive Grothendieck through texts detached from current dialogue. Editors could imagine that making a difficult manuscript legible served a collective good. Grothendieck asserted that service did not replace authorization. The conflict was not between work and oblivion only; it was between different accounts of responsibility to work.

The final years therefore belong partly to a history of nonparticipation. Grothendieck did not return to arbitrate terminology, correct reminiscences, bless schools, or explain which later results matched his intentions. His absence forced mathematics to proceed without founder authority. That may have been painful or liberating to others; motives attributed to him remain unknown.

Founder authority would in any case have limits. A theorem does not become true because Grothendieck approves it, and a historical claim does not become false because he dislikes it. Mathematical validity and documentary evidence retain independent standards. His refusal changes access and ethics, not logic.

This distinction allows respect without intellectual deference. The late manuscripts deserve preservation and specialist study. Their author’s extraordinary reputation warrants attention but not automatic validation. His wish for non-publication warrants serious treatment but not false claims about what the page says.

The community’s continuing work also means that seclusion was not mathematical isolation in the global sense. Grothendieck may have separated himself from current discussion, but concepts associated with him were connected to thousands of researchers. A person can be absent from a network while work bearing his influence saturates it.

The village thus stood beside, not outside, modern mathematics. Mail, copies, memories, and concepts crossed the distance even when seminars did not. “Invisible” names Grothendieck’s new production relative to public view; it does not make his mathematical past invisible.

Absence, refusal, secrecy, privacy

Four words often substitute for one another in accounts of the final years. Absence describes what an observer does not encounter. Refusal describes an action by Grothendieck. Secrecy describes active concealment of information. Privacy describes a legitimate boundary around life and information. They overlap without being identical.

Grothendieck was absent from conferences and publications. He refused forms of contact and publication. The location of his home was kept from broad circulation for years. His daily life remained private. None of those facts proves that every contact was refused, that every fact was secret, or that privacy was complete.

The distinction matters because “total isolation” is a dramatic absolute. The 1995 archive transfer and the 2010 letter to Illusie are enough to refute it literally. Material needs and postal systems also imply relations without revealing their content. The accurate phrase is near-total withdrawal from public and professional life.

Privacy is not the same as historical insignificance. Grothendieck’s choice affected editors who could not obtain consent, colleagues who received no answer, and institutions holding papers. Those effects are legitimate subjects. The contents of a medical consultation, household routine, or family conversation are not automatically legitimate because they might explain an effect.

Nor does refusal make every later disclosure a violation. Death, public honors, an archive transfer, and a signed declaration have public dimensions. A historian can report them from authoritative sources. The boundary is crossed when an unnecessary intimate detail is used to create proximity or diagnosis.

The rumor economy

Seclusion creates scarcity, and scarcity creates value. A rare sighting becomes an anecdote; an anecdote gains sharper details in repetition; a local incident becomes evidence of personality; a reported belief becomes an entire diagnosis. Grothendieck’s fame increased the market for each step.

Obituaries often assembled such material into a reversal narrative. The mathematician who once built universal structures became the recluse who rejected reason. The contrast is narratively efficient and historically crude. Technical work in 1990–1991 and structured manuscripts through 1999 already disrupt it.

Another narrative turns him into a saint of refusal: untouched by institutions, living outside society, writing only for truth. That version also requires omission. His papers depended on custodians and libraries. His declarations depended on postal and mathematical networks. His earlier work remained institutional and collective even when he opposed institutions.

A third narrative treats the village as a puzzle for journalists to solve. Exact address, photographs, and testimony become trophies of access. The subject’s boundary supplies the story’s suspense. This biography rejects that structure. Lasserre is named because it is part of the public chronology; the house is not mapped.

Silence alone cannot eliminate rumor. The better method is controlled distinction. Record the narrow institutional fact about destroyed non-mathematical papers. State that the 2010 declaration requested withdrawal, not physical destruction. Record the approximate archive counts with their units. Where a vivid claim lacks equivalent support, identify it as excluded rather than paraphrasing it attractively.

The rule protects Grothendieck from sensationalism, but not only him. It protects relatives, correspondents, neighbors, and care workers whose lives can be exposed by the late-life story. Their proximity to a famous person does not erase their privacy.

The village is not a camera

Mapping Lasserre at regional scale helps a reader understand distance from Montpellier and proximity to Saint-Girons. Mapping the house would serve a different purpose: it would invite the page to cross the boundary the chapter describes. Any map of the village years should therefore stop at commune and region.

The same principle applies to descriptive prose. A village can be characterized through verified geography without turning every landscape feature into a reflection of the resident. Mountains do not prove spiritual aspiration. A narrow road does not prove refusal. Weather does not reveal mood. Place shapes practical conditions, but symbolism must not replace evidence.

The label “hermit” is especially powerful because it brings an inherited scene: cell, austerity, contemplation, renunciation, perhaps sanctity. Grothendieck did not belong to a monastic order in Lasserre, and the public record does not establish a religious rule of life. “Recluse” or “in seclusion” describes access more accurately when carefully limited.

Press photography creates similar problems. A distant image of an unwilling subject may be authentic in the sense that it depicts a real person, yet ethically unsuitable. Authenticity is a minimum, not the whole image rule. Consent, context, date, and method of capture matter. This book uses no covert late-life portrait.

A photograph of the house would also outlive its original context. Even after Grothendieck’s death, it could expose later occupants or turn a private residence into a destination. The biography has no need to create such a site. Manuscript leaves, maps without addresses, and institutional documents tell the relevant history more directly.

Local testimony remains valuable when it establishes a public event. But a vivid account by one official or neighbor is not transformed into representative truth about “the village.” Communities contain differing memories and obligations. The silence of residents may reflect respect, uncertainty, ordinary indifference, or a request; motive should not be collectivized.

The phrase “the village kept his secret” is therefore too literary unless supported by broad evidence. It makes hundreds of people into one character and Grothendieck into a secret they possessed. The safer statement is that his address and daily life did not enter ordinary public accounts for many years.

This restraint allows Lasserre to remain a place rather than a brand. It was where Grothendieck lived and wrote, not an exhibit built around him. The biography names it because historical erasure would be artificial. It refuses to mine it because naming is enough.

Testing late-life testimony

If additional testimony is later proposed, four tests should govern inclusion: whether the witness directly observed the event, whether a dated record or independent witness supports the claim, whether the detail explains a consequential public event, and whether publication would expose health, family, address, or another person without sufficient reason.

Direct observation alone is not enough. Memory changes; conflict shapes emphasis; fame can reorganize recollection. A witness may be entirely sincere and mistaken about date or sequence. Contemporary notes deserve greater weight than an interview decades later.

Corroboration must match the claim. A letter proving that Grothendieck refused one visitor does not prove that he refused everyone. A hospital admission does not prove a long medical history. A manuscript expressing a belief does not prove he acted on it in every context.

Necessity guards against true trivia. Suppose a source reliably describes his food, clothing, or housekeeping. Unless the detail connects directly to a documented choice with historical consequence, it adds voyeurism rather than understanding. The fame of the subject does not convert routine into public property.

Harm review extends to people who disagree with him. A correspondent criticized in a late manuscript may be identifiable and alive. Publishing the passage can revive an accusation without evidence. A responsible editor may summarize the manuscript’s pattern, anonymize where possible, or withhold the example.

The protocol also requires language discipline. “According to X” does not cure a defamatory or invasive claim. Attribution is necessary but not sufficient. The source itself must meet the threshold, and the detail must serve the narrative contract.

Anonymous testimony has a narrow place. It may provide a lead to a document, but it cannot support a high-risk fact alone. Press phrases such as “those close to him said” obscure number, proximity, and possible dependence among witnesses. They are excluded from factual cards until traced.

Institutional records are not infallible either. The Montpellier archive page gives one wrong death date in its biographical overview while another university page gives the correct date. This discrepancy is resolved through contemporary death reports and the university’s later article. Authority must still be cross-checked. 77Université de Montpellier, “Archives Grothendieck”; Université de Montpellier, “28 000 pages d’Alexandre Grothendieck”; Associated Press, “Alexander Grothendieck, Iconic Mathematician, Dies at Age 86”.

The objective is not to make the late years impossible to study. It is to build a record that another researcher can audit. A small number of strong facts is more useful than a seamless account whose sources dissolve under inspection.

Quoting the late manuscripts

Privacy review does not end once a manuscript enters a national collection. Repository access establishes that a qualified reader may consult under stated conditions. It does not automatically make every sentence suitable for a trade biography, a searchable website, or an illustrated facsimile.

The risk is highest where Grothendieck names private people, recounts sexuality or family conflict, assigns spiritual roles, or makes accusations. A quotation can harm through identifiability even if the name is removed. Context, dates, and relationships may reveal the subject.

Direct quotation also magnifies rhetoric. A long, repetitive manuscript may contain one shocking sentence that is unrepresentative in scale but irresistible in publicity. Extracting it can make the archive look designed around extremity. Sampling should instead ask whether the passage represents a sustained theme, a revision, or an isolated formulation.

For high-risk content, paraphrase is not automatically safer. A compressed paraphrase may remove qualification and make an accusation sound firmer. The correct alternatives include fuller context, neutral description of subject, anonymization, or omission.

Grothendieck’s own 2010 exception for several-line quotations supplies a textual ceiling, not a complete ethical permission. This account keeps excerpts shorter still and uses them for documentary analysis: the opening statement, the library request, and the short-quotation parenthesis. It does not quote intimate metaphysics for color. 88Grothendieck, “Déclaration d’intention de non-publication”.

Mathematical quotation raises different problems. A definition or formula may need several lines to be intelligible. Rather than reproduce long passages from an unpublished manuscript, the biography can summarize with specialist review and direct readers to archive IDs. A future scholarly edition can handle the full text under its permissions.

Translation doubles the responsibility. A charged French term may have no neutral English equivalent. “Psyché,” “âme,” “esprit,” “Mal,” and “Diable” carry philosophical and theological histories. Translation should preserve capitalization where meaningful and identify whether a term is Grothendieck’s category or the narrator’s.

The quotations in this Part are therefore documentary windows, not a substitute edition. Two epigraph candidates remain amber because their original manuscript pages have not been checked directly. That incompletion is visible rather than repaired by confidence.

This method honors the declaration in a practical sense without pretending to solve its legal effect. It uses only what analysis needs, attributes every line, and refuses bulk reproduction. It also keeps the biography answerable to readers who must be able to verify a quotation.

Public time and private time

From outside Lasserre, time was marked by publications about Grothendieck, conferences on ideas he had seeded, editions of older seminars, and the careers of generations he influenced. Inside the boundary, the high-threshold record offers only isolated dates. The two timelines should not be fused.

When a 2004 profile appears, it is an event in public reception, not necessarily an event Grothendieck read or answered. Later mathematical developments do not prove that he followed them. When an archive project begins, it may matter to holders without entering his daily awareness. Claims of knowledge require a letter or witness.

Conversely, private time may contain events absent from public history. Their absence does not make them unreal. It means this biography cannot use them. The distinction guards against a common assumption that a life outside media has stopped.

This is particularly important for older people. Public production often declines while relationships, memory, belief, and ordinary activity continue. A biography organized around achievements can mistake the reduction of public milestones for the reduction of personhood. Part XI avoids that equation.

Grothendieck’s earlier manuscripts demonstrate that invisible time could be full of writing. After 1999, no equivalent corpus is cataloged; the lesson cannot be extended as fact. It can only caution against equating invisibility with emptiness.

The two timelines meet at the 2010 letter because a private act deliberately enters public circulation. They meet again at the hospital because death becomes a public record. Between those intersections, the line remains double.

The visual timeline represents this by placing public documents above the axis and manuscript ranges below it, with the unrecorded daily life left unfilled. No icons suggest events the sources do not establish. Empty design space communicates a source limit rather than a mysterious void.

Such design resists the demand that every year carry an anecdote. The goal is not equal narrative density across a lifespan. It is proportionate confidence. Some years have seminar minutes and hundreds of letters; others have one declaration. The prose should reflect that inequality.

Public time also continues after death, when archives open and editions appear. Part XII will take up that line. Part XI ends where private agency over new acts ends, while acknowledging that privacy interests and the rights of others continue.

What the boundary preserved

A boundary is usually narrated through what it excludes: visitors, institutions, publication, inquiry. It can also be understood through what survived inside it. The Lasserre corpus remained sufficiently ordered to enter forty-one BnF units. La Clef remained with it in corrected typescript. The 2010 declaration remained as a signed page.

Survival does not prove that isolation was chosen for preservation, or that the papers survived because of it. It counters the image of withdrawal as pure negation. Objects endured, and some bear structures of intended legibility.

The boundary preserved uncertainty too. Because manuscripts were not publicly debated, their revisions and reception are less documented. Because the daily life was not routinely observed, motives remain open. Preservation of paper does not preserve complete context.

It also preserved disagreements. Grothendieck’s 2010 declaration sits beside the BnF’s later use of bequest terminology, whose legal basis is not adjudicated here. Editors’ labor sits beside his refusal; mathematical influence sits beside personal absence. No final synthesis should make one side disappear.

For the biographer, the boundary preserves a necessary humility. A complete life is not the same thing as a fully knowable life. “Complete biography” can mean that every documented period is responsibly addressed, not that every private hour is possessed.

The late period therefore changes the measure of completeness. Six chapters can establish village, manuscript, letters, archive, boundary, and death while leaving scenes unwritten. The omissions are not holes to hide. They are outcomes of the evidence rule.

This approach also returns agency to Grothendieck without making him sovereign over all history. His refusals shaped access. They do not dictate mathematical truth or the rights of correspondents. His seclusion shaped the record. It does not authorize legends about motives.

At the edge of death, what remains is neither a solved character nor an empty hermit. It is a person whose public acts can be dated, whose papers can be cataloged, whose private life cannot be ethically converted into entertainment, and whose work had long exceeded his control.

Inferring states of mind

Grothendieck’s late religious claims invite retrospective psychiatric labels. This chapter does not assign one. No clinical record meeting the necessary evidentiary and ethical threshold is available in the sources used here. A biographer is not converted into a clinician by reading a manuscript.

This does not mean the manuscripts cannot be analyzed critically. A metaphysical claim can be distinguished from evidence, and repetition, contradiction, and formal structure can be described. These are properties of texts and public acts.

Diagnosis would add a causal classification. It would require knowledge of symptoms, duration, impairment, medical context, alternative explanations, and professional examination. Retrospective labels offered by acquaintances or biographers do not supply that foundation. They often carry the rhetorical function of explaining how a great mathematician could hold beliefs the writer rejects.

The question itself is misleading. Mathematical ability never guarantees correct judgment in religion, politics, relationships, or physics. No illness is needed to explain intellectual error outside one’s expertise. Conversely, a person with illness can produce valid mathematics. Conflating mathematical truth with mental normality harms both history and people.

The strongest account stays at the level of evidence. Grothendieck’s writings describe dreams, evil, and cosmos, while the 2010 declaration documents a publication boundary. The motives and medical meanings remain unclaimed.

2010: the boundary speaks

The 2010 declaration punctures the apparent silence because it is direct, dated, and deliberate. Grothendieck did not allow a representative to speak for him. He wrote to Illusie, attached a general statement, and sought its circulation. 99Grothendieck, “Déclaration d’intention de non-publication”; Grothendieck, Lettre à L. Illusie.

The page defines a boundary around texts rather than around the body. It covers works, extracts, letters, translations, print, and electronic form. It names the author’s agreement as the missing condition. It asks publishers and libraries to remove unauthorized editions. It leaves a narrow space for short quotation. 1010Grothendieck, “Déclaration d’intention de non-publication”.

That specificity should govern the chapter. The late boundary was not limited to “leave me alone,” though some reports summarize it that way. In the best primary evidence, it was also “do not reproduce my words without agreement.” The object of control was authorship and circulation.

At the same time, the declaration shows that the boundary had become porous enough to cause concern. Grothendieck had heard of projects. Texts had circulated. Editors and readers were acting beyond his direct supervision. A prohibition becomes necessary only where an audience exists.

The document therefore joins solitude to a public problem of modern media. Electronic copies could multiply while the author remained in one village. Withdrawal from society did not withdraw texts already dispersed. The 2010 page attempts to make authorial will travel farther than the author.

Silence is not one thing

Silence can be imposed by missing records, chosen by a person, negotiated with others, or constructed by a later narrator. Grothendieck’s final years contain all but cannot be reduced to any one.

The archive imposes silence where pages do not survive or remain restricted. Grothendieck chose silence toward many public and professional approaches. Institutions negotiated silence by restricting correspondence and manuscript communication. Biographers construct silence when they omit known material, sometimes responsibly and sometimes to create mystery.

The 2010 declaration is speech about silence. It does not cease publication alone; it asks others to enact non-publication. That request creates a social boundary. Editors, librarians, family, and readers must decide how to respond. Silence becomes organized labor.

There is a danger in aestheticizing it. Phrases such as “the great silence” can make absence seem pure and complete, detached from unanswered letters or practical burdens. A boundary can protect a person while costing others. The biography need not calculate those costs without testimony, but it should not romanticize them away.

There is an opposite danger in treating silence as aggression by definition. People may withdraw for reasons they do not owe the public. An unanswered request for an interview does not establish hostility. This account therefore describes consequences without assigning intention.

Texts complicate silence further. Thirty thousand pages are not silence from the writer’s perspective, even if no audience sees them. They are silence in circulation. The distinction explains Part XI’s title: visible absence coexisted with invisible production.

After the manuscript sequence ends, even production becomes unknown. The chapter should not extend “invisible work” as a factual claim through 2014. It can say that earlier work remained invisible and that no comparable later sequence is cataloged. Grammar marks the evidence boundary.

Chapter 66 gives the death record; this chapter ends with the last documented boundary before November 13, 2014. 1111Associated Press, “Alexander Grothendieck, Iconic Mathematician, Dies at Age 86”; Université de Montpellier, “28 000 pages d’Alexandre Grothendieck”; Bruce Weber and Julie Rehmeyer, “Alexander Grothendieck, Math Enigma, Dies at 86,” The New York Times, November 14, 2014, https://julierehmeyer.com/files/Alexander_Grothendieck_obituary_NYT.pdf.