Alexander Grothendieck Quotes
Among the thousand-and-one faces whereby form chooses to reveal itself to us, the one that fascinates me more than any other, and continues to fascinate me, is the structure hidden in mathematical things.
Alexander Grothendieck
Quotes to Explore
Discovery is the privilege of the child: the child who has no fear of being once again wrong, of looking like an idiot, of not being serious, of not doing things like everyone else.
Alexander Grothendieck
I am not really doing research, just trying to cultivate myself.
Alexander Grothendieck
If there is one thing in mathematics that fascinates me more than anything else (and doubtless always has), it is neither "number" nor "size", but always form. And among the thousand-and-one faces whereby form chooses to reveal itself to us, the one that fascinates me more than any other and continues to fascinate me, is the structure hidden in mathematical things.
Alexander Grothendieck
The question you raise, 'How can such a formulation lead to computations?' doesn't bother me in the least! Throughout my whole life as a mathematician, the possibility of making explicit, elegant computations has always come out by itself, as a byproduct of a thorough conceptual understanding of what was going on. Thus I never bothered about whether what would come out would be suitable for this or that, but just tried to understand - and it always turned out that understanding was all that mattered.
Alexander Grothendieck
The introduction of the digit 0 or the group concept was general nonsense too, and mathematics was more or less stagnating for thousands of years because nobody was around to take such childish steps...
Alexander Grothendieck
It is less than four years since cohomological methods (i.e. methods of Homological Algebra) were introduced into Algebraic Geometry in Serre's fundamental paper
Alexander Grothendieck