Alexander Grothendieck, RIP.

The interest isn’t just in the mathematics, so much as in his character: he was a maximally intolerant of BS. He was also intense.

Coincidentally, after yesterday’s post announcing it, I had dinner with someone who grew up knowing him and broke the news to him. Both he and his wife grew up with (coincidentally) G as a friend of their respective families. There are plenty of G stories. One of the stories, he said G once opened one of his high shool math books, looked at it with horror, then ran to show it to Dieudonné (another giant), shouting: “look at the garbage they teach students”.

G was self taught; he believed that school couldn’t teach anyone anything except junk, and that academia was the refuge of the corrupt, the uninspired, and the incompetent.

Alexander Grothendieck, RIP. The interest isn’t… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.