OF THE
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Alexander Grothendieck (born March 28, 1928 in Berlin, Germany) is one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century. He is also one of its most extreme scientific personalities, with achievements over a short span of years which are still astounding in their broad scope and sheer bulk, and a lifestyle later in his career which alienated even close followers. He made major contributions to algebraic geometry, homological algebra, and functional analysis. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966, and co-awarded the Crafoord Prize with Pierre Deligne in 1988. He declined the latter prize on ethical grounds in a letter to the media.[4]
He is noted for his mastery of abstract approaches to mathematics, and his perfectionism in matters of formulation and presentation. In particular, his ability to derive concrete results using only very general methods is considered to be unique amongst mathematicians. Relatively little of his work after 1960 was published by the conventional route of the learned journal, circulating initially in duplicated volumes of seminar notes; his influence was to a considerable extent personal, on French mathematics and the Zariski school at Harvard University.
He is the subject of many stories and some misleading rumors concerning his work habits and politics, confrontations with other mathematicians and the French authorities, his withdrawal from mathematics at age 42, his retirement, and his subsequent lengthy writings.
"Grothendieck's political views were considered to be radical left wing and pacifist. He gave lectures on category theory in the forests surrounding Hanoi while the city was being bombed, to protest against the Vietnam war.Grothendieck also declined his 1966 award in Moscow in protest against the Soviet Union's military intervention in Eastern Europe, though he later accepted.
He retired from scientific life around 1970, after having discovered the partly military funding of IHES (see pp. xii and xiii of SGA1, S pringer Lecture Notes 224). He returned to academia a few years later as a professor at the University of Montpellier, where he stayed until his retirement in 1988. His criticisms of the scientific community are also contained in a letter written in 1988, in which he states the reasons for his refusal of the Crafoord Prize."
"The Universe, the World, let alone the Cosmos, are basically very strange and distant entities. They don't really concern us. It is not towards them that the deepest part of ourselves is drawn. What attracts us is an immediate and tangible Incarnation of them, that which is close, "physical", imbued with profound resonances and rich in mystery- that which is conflated with the origins of our being in the flesh, and of our species - and of That which at all times awaits us, silently and ever welcoming, "at the end of the road". It is She, the Mother, She who gives us birth as she gives birth to the World, She who subdues the urges or opens the floodgates of desire, carrying us to our encounter with Her, thrusting us forwards towards Her, to a ceaseless return and immersion in Her.But back to the article that states "Isham and his colleagues at Imperial College London and elsewhere believe they can glimpse the answers to these profound questions."
Thus, digressing from the road on this unanticipated "promenade", I found, quite by accident, a parable with which I was familiar, which I'd almost forgotten - the parable of The Child and the Mother. One might look upon it as a parable of "Life in Search of Itself" . Or, at the simple level of personal existence, a parable of "Being, in its quests for things " .
It's a parable, and it's also the expression of an ancestral experience, deeply implanted in the psyche - the most powerful of the original symbols that give nourishment to the deepest levels of creativity. I believe I recognize in it , as expressed in the timeless language of archetypal images, the very breath of the creative power in man, animating flesh and spirit, from their most humble and most ephemerable manifestations to those which are most startling and indestructible.
This "breath", even like the carnal image that incarnates it, is the most unassuming of all things in existence. It is also that which is most fragile, the most neglected and the most despised ...
And the history of the vicissitudes of this breath over the course of its existence is nothing other than your adventure, the "adventure of knowledge" in your life. The wordless parable that gives it expression is that of the child and the mother.
You are the child, issued from the Mother, sheltered in Her, nourished by her power. And the child rushes towards the Mother, the Ever-Close, the Well-Understood - towards the encounter with Her, the Unlimited, yet forever Unknowable and full of mystery ...."
Comment: As for Sir William Herschel - from this link. Also drop 'Planet X' or 'The 12th Planet' and add 'Dark Companion Brown Dwarf Star' on the linked website and you see a picture that has been hidden from us start to form.
New York Times
January 30, 1983
Something out there beyond the farthest reaches of the known solar system seems to be tugging at Uranus and Neptune. Some gravitational force keeps perturbing the two giant planets, causing irregularities in their orbits. The force suggests a presence far away and unseen, a large object that may be the long- sought Planet X. ... The last time a serious search of the skies was made it led to the discovery in 1930 of Pluto, the ninth planet. But the story begins more than a century before that, after the discovery of Uranus in 1781 by the English astronomer and musician William Herschel. Until then, the planetary system seemed to end with Saturn.
As astronomers observed Uranus, noting irregularities in its orbital path, many speculated that they were witnessing the gravitational pull of an unknown planet. So began the first planetary search based on astronomers predictions, which ended in the 1840's with the discovery of Neptune almost simultaneously by English, French, and German astronomers. But Neptune was not massive enough to account entirely for the orbital behavior of Uranus. Indeed, Neptune itself seemed to be affected by a still more remote planet. In the last 19th century, two American astronomers, Willian H. Pickering and Percival Lowell, predicted the size and approximate location of the trans-Neptunian body, which Lowell called Planet X. Years later, Pluto was detected by Clyde W. Tombaugh working at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Several astronomers, however, suspected it might not be the Planet X of prediction. Subsequent observation proved them right. Pluto was too small to change the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, the combined mass of Pluto and its recently discovered satellite, Charon, is only 1/5 that of Earth's moon.
Recent calculations by the United States Naval Observatory have confirmed the orbital perturbation exhibited by Uranus and Neptune, which Dr. Thomas C Van Flandern, an astronomer at the observatory, says could be explained by "a single undiscovered planet". He and a colleague, Dr. Richard Harrington, calculate that the 10th planet should be two to five times more massive than Earth and have a highly elliptical orbit that takes it some 5 billion miles beyond that of Pluto - hardly next-door but still within the gravitational influence of the Sun. ...