Alexander Grothendieck. To protest against the Vietnam War, he gave lectures on category theory in the forests surrounding Hanoi while the city was being bombed. In 1966, he had declined to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow, where he was to receive the Fields Medal.
La Clef des Songes, a 315-page manuscript written in 1987, is Grothendieck's account of how his consideration of the source of dreams led him to conclude that a deity exists. As part of the notes to this manuscript, Grothendieck described the life and the work of 18 "mutants", people whom he admired as visionaries far ahead of their time and heralding a new age. The only mathematician on his list was Bernhard Riemann. Influenced by the Catholic mystic Marthe Robin who was claimed to have survived on the Holy Eucharist alone, Grothendieck almost starved himself to death in 1988. His growing preoccupation with spiritual matters was also evident in a letter entitled Lettre de la Bonne Nouvelle sent to 250 friends in January 1990. In it, he described his encounters with a deity and announced that a "New Age" would commence on 14 October 1996.
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Во время «Парижской весны» 1968 года Гротендик заметил, что его коллеги-математики в основном поддерживают не студентов, а «буржуазное» правительство, и возмутился. В 1969 году он узнал, что Институт высших научных исследований, где он работал много лет, частично финансируется министерством обороны, и ушёл из него. Далее он обратил внимание на то, что среди математиков тоже встречаются «аристократы» и «крепостные», и что иной раз влиятельный учёный отклоняет под благовидным предлогом работу молодого математика, особенно не своего ученика, «это не актуально», «тупиковый путь», а затем использует идеи отклонённой работы. Ещё чаще труды молодых просто игнорируют научные «клики» и «мафии». Гротендик удалился в Монпелье, где он когда-то самостоятельно открыл теорию меры, и оставил занятия математикой.
<•> In 1957 he was invited to visit Harvard by Oscar Zariski, but the offer fell through when he refused to sign a pledge promising not to work to overthrow the United States government—a refusal which, he was warned, threatened to land him in prison.
<•> To protest against the Vietnam War, he gave lectures on category theory in the forests surrounding Hanoi while the city was being bombed. In 1966, he had declined to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow, where he was to receive the Fields Medal. He retired from scientific life around 1970 after he had found out that IHÉS was partly funded by the military.
<•> Thus, he became a stateless person for at least the majority of his working life and he traveled on a Nansen passport. <•> Local villagers helped sustain him with a more varied diet after he tried to live on a staple of dandelion soup.
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