A publisher has finally published in a paper version a mythical text for professional, amateur or simply curious mathematicians. Harvests and sowing. Reflections and testimony on a mathematician’s past was written between 1983 and 1986 by Frenchman Alexandre Grothendieck (1928-2014), considered one of the most important mathematicians of the XXe century, Fields medal in 1966. Only digital versions taken from the original typescript, distributed in two hundred copies at the time, were available until now. For Gallimard, these 1,926 pages in two volumes are already a success, with a first print run of 5,000 copies already sold out.
There are two ways to account for Harvests and Sowing. Do not read it and talk about it while embroidering around its author, to the life of the most romantic. Or really read it, enjoy it and go from surprise to surprise.
Because the book is not an autobiography. A few lines on the past of this young German-Russian child who took refuge in France during the Second World War. Few things about his resignation in 1970 for political reasons from his laboratory, to launch an environmental movement and, after his retirement, to end his life in retirement in Ariège.
Incredible mathematical landscapes
If it is not an autobiography, it is on the other hand a remarkable text which immerses the reader in the head of this creator and his incredible (and understandable!) mathematical landscapes, and which seduces with deep and sometimes poetic metaphors.
And it is above all the logbook of a deeply wounded man who discovers, ten years after leaving the mathematical community, the treatment reserved for his work and his person by his colleagues, what he describes as a ” interment “. It’s violent : « massacre », “ransack”, “cutting” of his heritage… The observation is terrible, without doubt unique in the history of science: the sidelining of a genius during his lifetime. Can you imagine Einstein in the closet? The words are also harsh against those who would have buried him: « mafia », « corruption », “dishonesty”… More precisely, the charges fall: appropriation of ideas, plagiarism, deletion of references, incorrect intellectual paternity… Nowadays, it would be worth entering a referent to scientific integrity.
A real settling of scores in the land of maths, coupled with a police investigation where “Inspector Grothendieck” scrutinizes the scientific literature, makes verification phone calls, dives back into the articles… in order to bring to light the conspiracy against him .
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