The Grothendieck I Knew: Telling, Not Hiding, Not Judging [pdf]

I am reminded of a fascinating paragraph about Grothendieck from the book The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy. Quoting it from Chapter 12: The Missing Piece of the Jigsaw here:

But for Grothendieck this was not abstraction for abstraction's sake. In his view this was a revolution that was necessitated by the questions that mathematics was trying to answer. He wrote volume after volume describing this new language. Grothendieck's vision was messianic, and he began to attract a following of faithful young disciples. His output was huge, covering some ten thousand pages. When a visitor complained at the poor state of the library at the Institut, he replied, 'We don't read books here, we write them'.

If you happen to read Spanish, professional philolospher Fernando Zalamea has finally finished his book on Grothendiek planed as a guidebook for someone overwhelmed by the huge extension of G's production. "A. Grothendieck, una guía a la obra matemática y filosófica" (A. G., A guide to the mathematical and philosophical works). Well researched if you ask me. Freely available. Zalamea is a philosopher that category theorists would like.

https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Alexander+Grothendieck, at the end

Cartier's personal recollections of Grothendieck is also fascinating.

A country of which nothing is known but the name: http://xahlee.info/math/i/Alexander_Grothendieck_cartier.pdf

  > ... **Not Judging** ...
  > ...
  > Despite it all, I hope to have achieved a truthful text that illustrates the
  > **unclassifiable** person Grothendieck was.
  > ...
  > The quite unusual style of writing—with sentences, subsentences, and the
  > excessive use of cross references—intrigued me. One of my friends, a
  > professional psychoan-alyst, declared that **the author was paranoiac**.

Ignore this guy and just read Récolte & Semailles[1]

[1]: https://www.quarante-deux.org/archives/klein/prefaces/Romans...

Perhaps someone here can expand the Wikipedia article on the author. It's quite short:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Ribenboim