Alexander Grothendieck has died
Grothendieck's comments on creativity have been very important in my life, especially the following quote (in translation from the French):<p>"To state it in slightly different terms: in those critical years [roughly from age 17 to 20] I learned how to be alone."<p>"This formulation doesn't really capture my meaning. I didn't, in any literal sense learn to be alone, for the simple reason that this knowledge had never been unlearned during my childhood. It is a basic capacity in all of us from the day of our birth. However these 3 years of work in isolation, when I was thrown onto my own resources, following guidelines which I myself had spontaneously invented, instilled in me a strong degree of confidence, unassuming yet enduring, in my ability to do mathematics, which owes nothing to any consensus or to the fashions which pass as law...."<p>"By this I mean to say: to reach out in my own way to the things I wished to learn, rather than relying on the notions of the consensus, overt or tacit, coming from a more or less extended clan of which I found myself a member, or which for any other reason laid claim to be taken as an authority. This silent consensus had informed me, both at the lyé and at the university, that one shouldn't bother worrying about what was really meant when using a term like "volume", which was "obviously self-evident", "generally known", "unproblematic", etc. I'd gone over their heads, almost as a matter of course, even as Lesbesgue himself had, several decades before, gone over their heads. It is in this gesture of "going beyond", to be something in oneself rather than the pawn of a consensus, the refusal to stay within a rigid circle that others have drawn around one - it is in this solitary act that one finds true creativity. All others things follow as a matter of course."<p>Very late in his life, Grothendieck asked for people to cease re-publishing his work, even brief excerpts.  (See: <a href="http://sbseminar.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/grothendiecks-letter/" rel="nofollow">http://sbseminar.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/grothendiecks-lett...</a> )  So I have mixed feelings about quoting the above.  But I do so in the hope that it can help others as it has helped me.