Originally posted by Grey Council
and nice post Euler. But what did those people DO? Why are they famous?
Grothendieck is a mystery to most people. But more is being done to try and understand him and his ideas. He started out in Topological Vector spaces, but later became a leader in Algebraic Geometry.
More can be found at
http://www.grothendieck-circle.org/ and
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Grothendieck.html
One story has it that he wanted to visit a country to collaborate with other mathematicians, I think it was France. He refused to take some sort of oath because of religious or moral reasons. So he asked them how many books and how many visitors he was allowed in prison.
He also wrote this (this is an ongoing translation from the French version):
http://www.fermentmagazine.org/rands/recoltes1.html
and distributed it to help others, and himself, understand his relationship with mathematics, aimed at the lay people. He was disappointed that he could not produce the 1000 pages of manuscript in one day, taking him 3 weeks.
One of the brief timelines of his life ends with "1991: In August, Grothendieck leaves his home suddenly, without warning anyone, for an unknown location. He spends his time writing an enormous work on physics and philosophical meditations on themes such as free choice, determinism and the existence of evil. He refuses practically every human contact."
Another story is one of Sato, a japanese mathematician. He left abruptly one day, leaving all teaching duties and just disappeared. He reappeared two years later, but when he did, he opened up many new branches of mathematics. When asked about where he went, he said that he went for a long walk.
As for Paul Erds (pronounced air-dish), he spent all his time on mathematics, and not much else. He lived and travelled with his mother until her death. He had no home and no job and spent his time travelling the world, with just two suitcases (one for clothes, one for maths - the one with clothes was not heavy at all), looking for people to collaborate with. In his time, he was the internet. He would be the one who would spread the word on who was working on what and with which approach, carrying most things in his head. He didn't like human contact - after a handshake, he would immediately want to wash his hands thoroughly. He liked Grapefruit. He died during a mathematics talk.
See
www.paulerdos.com
Then there are the great Giants that live in the history of mathematics: Euler (this is my nick, but I am not referring to myself), Gauss, Newton, Ramanujan, Hardy, Littlewood, Weil, and plenty more.
Oh, and one last one: Nicolas Bourbaki. This was not a person, but a group of mathematicians who made mathematics rigorous. Before Bourbaki, mathematics was in a kind of mess. These people rectified the situation and volumes of mathematics redefining what was "common knowledge". more at
http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/NicolasBourbaki.html
