Extraordinary mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck celebrates his 80th birthday in self-imposed isolation

There is an interesting Reddit discussion talking about the man:

http://reddit.com/info/6ivyk/comments/

For those who don't know who Grothendieck was, he essentially pioneered how we do modern mathematics. What Weierstrass, Riemann and Cauchy did to formalize the calculus, Grothendieck did to modern algebraic, topological and analytic notions. With the exception of Godel, I can't think of many mathematicians in the same league as he is (or at least was).