David Mumford and John Tate were asked (by Nature) to write an obituary for Alexander Grothendieck. So John and I agreed and wrote the obituary below. Since the readership of Nature were more or less entirely made up of non-mathematicians, it seemed as though our challenge was to try to make some key parts of Grothendiecks work accessible to such an audience. Obviously the very definition of a scheme is central to nearly all his work, and we also wanted to say something genuine about categories and cohomology. Heres what we came up with: » Can one explain schemes to biologists, The sad thing is that this was rejected as much too technical for their readership. Their editor wrote me that higher degree polynomials, infinitesimal vectors and complex space (even complex numbers) were things at least half their readership had never come across. The gap between the world I have lived in and that even of scientists has never seemed larger. I am prepared for lawyers and business people to say they hated math and not to remember any math beyond arithmetic, but this!? Nature is read only by people belonging to the acronym STEM ( = Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and in the Common Core Standards, all such people are expected to learn a hell of a lot of math. Very depressing.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 20:03:36 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015