The Einstein of maths

The odds are that the name Alexandre Grothendieck will mean little or nothing to most Spectator readers. It’s a name I heard for the first time in high summer two years or so ago, not long, as I remember it, after the film A Beautiful Mind had come out. I was in the garden of my friend Umar’s house in Cambridge, and we were waiting for his ancient cast-iron barbecue, Camp Freddie, to cook some sausages.

Umar is a mathematician of considerable braininess, and when we are together we often end up talking maths. That is, I tend to ask him to explain what he does, and he tends to try, and I tend not to understand. But sometimes we strike gold. An entire afternoon was once passed happily playing logic games involving prisoners with different-coloured hats. I have giggled ignorantly at maths jokes (‘What’s purple and commutes?’ ‘An Abelian grape’), hummed and hawed over the question of whether maths is discovered or invented, and been mindboggled for a week after he explained the concept of the ‘cardinality of infinities’ (some infinities are bigger than others, it turns out).

By Grothendieck I was riveted. The story, in short, is of a mathematician of staggering accomplishment (in one of the hens’-teeth-rare public references to him he is described as ‘the mathematician whose work was to lead to a unification of geometry, number theory, topology and complex analysis’) who has retreated, like a Salinger or a Pynchon of number theory, into utter isolation. The most recent cutting dismisses him as ‘last heard of raging about the Devil somewhere in the Pyrenees’.

It would not be an exaggeration, I think, to describe Grothendieck as a legendary figure in the mathematical world. Yet if you run a search through the cuttings library of the mainstream press, you will find barely a single mention of his name.