Alexander Grothendieck

Born in Berlin on March 28, 1928 to anarchist parents who suffered in Nazi concentration camps, Alexander Grothendieck survived World War II as a stateless refugee hidden in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France. Educated at the University of Montpellier and the University of Nancy under Laurent Schwartz and Jean Dieudonné, Grothendieck stunned the mathematical world in his twenties by resolving fourteen deep open problems in functional analysis. In 1958, he joined the newly founded Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) outside Paris, where over the next twelve years he orchestrated one of the most astonishing intellectual revolutions in human history. Grothendieck completely reformulated algebraic geometry from its foundations, introducing the revolutionary concepts of "schemes" (unifying geometry and number theory), "topoi" (generalizing topological spaces), and "motives" (seeking the underlying universal thread beneath cohomology theories). His seminars and monumental multi-volume treatise "Éléments de géométrie algébrique" (EGA) became the foundational canon of modern geometry. In 1966, he was awarded the Fields Medal, but boycotted the ceremony in Moscow to protest the Soviet Union's military actions. An uncompromising pacifist and radical environmentalist, Grothendieck abruptly resigned from IHÉS in 1970 upon discovering that the institute received military research grants. He founded the radical ecology group "Survivre et Vivre," and in 1991, vanished into total hermit seclusion in the Pyrenees village of Lasserre, writing thousands of pages of philosophical memoirs ("Récoltes et semailles"). Passing away on November 13, 2014 at age 86, Alexander Grothendieck is revered as the Einstein of modern mathematics.