Grothendieck's notes to be released on 10th May

TL;DR: he's "regarded by some as the greatest mathematician of the 20th century" so his last 20 years of notes (written in seclusion) are a big deal

Mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck's notes released online.

An agreement has finally been found between the mathematician's family and the university of Montpellier, which owned 28.000 pages of notes. They will soon be available on the Internet.

We had left Alexandre Grothendieck's archives in an unstable situation last December. Things have advanced ever since the director of the department of mathematics of the université de Montpellier, Jean Michel Marin, has started a constructive dialogue with the mathematician's heirs. For years, the institution and the mathematician's five children looked at eachother with distrust when it came to answer two questions: who owns do the 28.000 pages of notes retrieved by the university? Could we make his writings, as he said "scribbles" available to the scientific community?

[http://md1.libe.com/photo/1019323-math.jpg?modified_at=14939...] If the drawings found in the archives could let you believe that Alexandre Grothendieck's works are accessible, it still requires ten hours of work to an exprimented mathematician to decipher one page of his notes

This will be done on Wednesday, May 10th at 16h30 on the unversité of Montpellier's website. At first, 18.000 pages will be in free access. For the rest, mail essentially, you will need to wait for the green light from the people to whom were adressed the mails, Alexandre Grothendieck keeping a copy of each one.

100.000 pages never seen before

The one we often refer to as the greatest mathematician of the XXth century - Deceased at 84 years old in November of 2014 in Lasserre (Ariège), where he lived as a recluse for 23 years - had left behind 100.000 pages of notes to which noone ever has access to. To the 28.000 pages from Montpellier, we now have to add 65.000 carefully stored in fourty boxes custom made, and found in his house after his death.

What can we find in this treasure? Maybe nothing, unless... Alexandre Grothendieck worked at night and gave the fruit of his sleepless hours to scribes who spent hours transforming his intuitions in clear and irrefutable theorems. His goal can be shortened in a few words: reconcile algebra which demonstrates and geometry which shows. A goal still not yet achieved, on which geometricians and algebraists are still hard at work. Born in 1928 in Berlin, arrived in France on the eve of World War II at the age of 11, average student until a professor more curious than others incitees him to go to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris, when he gets his licence at the université of Montpellier. Alexandre Grothendieck is in his twenties when he discovers he has a gift for mathematics. He joins Nicolas Bourbaki's group of collaborators - this polycephal mathematician who invents collaborative work in the 40's - and earns the Fields medal, equivalent of the Nobel prize for mathematicians, in 1966.

His life will be made of breakage. Conceptual breakage first, when he pushes algebraic geometry forward with novel concepts, such as motives. But also social, familial, cultural, political and friendship breakage until the end of his life. In 1969, he invents with other what will become radical ecology, and breaks with scientific research which, to him, will end up on the end of the "eveything", according to his expression. In 1991, he retires in Lasserree, where he refuses to see visitors, whom he removes something smoothly, and sometimes with sharp verbal spikes.

The deciphering work is only beginning

If the question of the Montpellier archives is answered, now remains to find a solution for the 65.000 pages in Lasserre. Will they be sold? Will they be accessible some day? For now, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (TN: National Library of France) and the Institut des hautes études scientifiques (TN: Institute of higher scientific learning) cannot formulate an offer to the mathematician's children. The key question being: does this treasure have a price?

Those who will cliok on Grothendieck's archives must be warned of one thing. They rest as the foot of a mathematics Himalaya, since every handwritten page requirees a dozen of hours of work for an algebraist geometrician used to Grothendieckian 'scribbles'. Things now laid down flat, work begins.

To organise this deciphering, it will probably require a team of mathematicians working together throughout the world, not unlike the Polymaths. A mathematician asks a question, and whoevers has a piece of the answer brings his contribution. The final publication could mention fourty researchers who would only have met digitally.

Philippe Douroux, journalist for Libération