[cmath] Nature turns down an obituary on Grothendieck by Mumford and Tate

[barbeau at math.toronto.edu]

The issue is not whether a typical reader is on top of all the terminology
but whether in the obituary the writer gives a sense of the achievement of
the deceased and some sense of the range of ideas in which he operated.

If a given reader is unfamiliar with the technicalities, then that reader
has learned something -- that there is an important world beyond his
immediate ken that is consequential. And this is not a bad thing.

I think that Mumford succeeded in his purpose.

Ed Barbeau

>
> On 12/16/2014 12:18 PM, Nassif Ghoussoub wrote:
>> "I am prepared for lawyers and business people to say they hated math
>> and not to remember any math beyond arithmetic, but this!?"
>>
>>   http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2014/Grothendieck.html?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=t.co
>
> "All such people are expected to learn a hell of a lot of math." That,
> perhaps, misses the point.  It's not surprising or shocking that
> physicists and chemists don't know all the mathematics in the article -
> I will admit to not knowing it all myself.   What is shocking is that an
> editor who has, presumably, no compunction about exposing the tender
> minds of astronomers to obscure organometallic radicals, or mentioning
> rare wildflowers (by their Linnaean binomials, no less) in the presence
> of geologists, should feel that these scholars /should not//read /about
> mathematics that they do not know.
>
> Mathematics is a large enough subject that we are all ignorant of some
> of it.  This seems more like being terrified of it.
>