Provides an explanation of what made Alexandre Grothendieck the mathematician that he was. Thirteen articles written by people who knew him personally - some who even studied or collaborated with him over a period of many years - portray Grothendieck at work, explaining the nature of his thought through descriptions of his discoveries and contributions to various subjects, and with impressions, memories, anecdotes, and some biographical elements.
One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2021 Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining. When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.
The book is a bilingual (French and English) edition of the mathematical correspondence between A. Grothendieck and J-P. Serre. The original French text of 84 letters is supplemented here by the English translation, with French text printed on the left-hand pages and the corresponding English text printed on the right-hand pages. The book also includes several facsimiles of original letters. The letters presented in the book were mainly written between 1955 and 1965. During this period, algebraic geometry went through a remarkable transformation, and Grothendieck and Serre were among central figures in this process. The reader can follow the creation of some of the most important notions of modern mathematics, like sheaf cohomology, schemes, Riemann-Roch type theorems, algebraic fundamental group, motives. The letters also reflect the mathematical and political atmosphere of this period (Bourbaki, Paris, Harvard, Princeton, war in Algeria, etc.). Also included are a few letters written between 1984 and 1987. The letters are supplemented by J-P. Serre's notes, which give explanations, corrections, and references further results. The book should be useful to specialists in algebraic geometry, in history of mathematics, and to all mathematicians who want to understand how great mathematics is created.
What's wrong with stealing? What's the best way to blood test a pot-bellied pig? Should we tolerate intolerance? In the wake of his enormously popular books, The Armchair Economistand More Sex is Safer Sex, Steven Landsburg uses concepts from maths, economics and physics to address the big questions in philosophy: Where does knowledge come from? What's the difference between right and wrong? Do our beliefs matter? Is it possible to know everything? Provocative, utterly entertaining and always surprising, The Big Questions challenges readers to re-evaluate their most fundamental beliefs and reveals the relationship between the loftiest philosophical quests and our everyday lives.
Famed mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, in his Resume, set forth his plan for the study of the finer structure of Banach spaces. He used tensor products as a foundation upon which he built the classes of operators most important to the study of Banach spaces and established the importance of the "local" theory in the study of these operators and the spaces they act upon. When Lintenstrauss and Pelczynski addressed his work at the rebirth of Banach space theory, they shed his Fundamental Inequality in the trappings of operator ideals by shedding the tensorial formulation. The authors of this book, however, feel that there is much of value in Grothendieck's original formulations in the Resume and here endeavor to "expose the Resume" by presenting most of Grothendieck's arguments using the mathematical tools that were available to him at the time.
Grothendieck’s beautiful theory of schemes permeates modern algebraic geometry and underlies its applications to number theory, physics, and applied mathematics. This simple account of that theory emphasizes and explains the universal geometric concepts behind the definitions. In the book, concepts are illustrated with fundamental examples, and explicit calculations show how the constructions of scheme theory are carried out in practice.
Examines mathematical ideas and the visionary minds behind them. This book provides an account of celebrated mathematicians and their quirks, oddities, personal tragedies, bad behavior, descents into madness, tragic ends, and the beauty of their mathematical discoveries.
The second volume of Shafarevich's introductory book on algebraic geometry focuses on schemes, complex algebraic varieties and complex manifolds. As with Volume 1 the author has revised the text and added new material, e.g. a section on real algebraic curves. Although the material is more advanced than in Volume 1 the algebraic apparatus is kept to a minimum making the book accessible to non-specialists. It can be read independently of Volume 1 and is suitable for beginning graduate students in mathematics as well as in theoretical physics.
Mumford is a well-known mathematician and winner of the Fields Medal, the highest honor available in mathematics Many of these papers are currently unavailable, and the correspondence with Grothendieck has never before been published
