Alexander Grothendieck
28 March 1928 – 13 November 2014
Alexander Grothendieck was a French mathematician regarded as one of the greatest and most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. He transformed algebraic geometry through the development of scheme theory and a vast reformulation of the field's foundations. Awarded the Fields Medal in 1966, he later withdrew from the mathematical community and lived in seclusion for the rest of his life.
Lived at the same time
Well-documented people whose lives overlapped with Alexander Grothendieck.
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- Etel Adnan (1925–2021) Overlapped 86 years →
Life events
Alexander Grothendieck was born in Berlin to anarchist parents and spent a difficult childhood as a refugee.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHe completed his doctorate in Nancy with pioneering work in functional analysis and topological vector spaces.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHe became a founding professor at the IHÉS near Paris, where he led a school of algebraic geometry.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHe rebuilt the foundations of algebraic geometry through his Éléments de géométrie algébrique and the theory of schemes.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHe received the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow, which he declined to attend in protest.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHe resigned from the IHÉS after discovering it received partial military funding and turned toward political activism.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHe took a professorship at the University of Montpellier while withdrawing gradually from mainstream mathematics.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHe retired and eventually cut off contact with the mathematical world, living in a village in the Pyrenees.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHe died in Saint-Girons, Ariège, in 2014 after decades of seclusion.
Source: en.wikipedia.org