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

[Robert Dawson]

On 12/16/2014 5:53 PM, barbeau at math.toronto.edu wrote:
> 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.
>

So do I.  The obituary was excellent.  It even gave the careful reader a 
rather good idea of what Grothendieck had done.  And Nature should 
probably have run it. I say "probably" because Nature has always 
considered its /raison d'etre/ to exclude mathematics, except for quirky 
experimental stuff about how densely you can pack regular polyhedra 
without using any theory, which is more a sort of Lego physics.

We aren't currently planning on running an obituary for Grothendieck in 
the NOTES because we normally only do that when there is a strong 
Canadian connection. Nature is perhaps in the same boat.  What surprised 
me most was that they thought they /might/ run one. Had they thought 
/Recoltes et semailles /was an agronomy textbook?

It was only in his take on why the obit was declined that I thought he 
had perhaps not quite hit the nail on the head. Grothendieck's work was 
so specialized that I would /not/ expect most scientists to know 
anything about it; but Nature /would/ have run an obit for an 
experimental scientist whose work was equally specialized.

Cheers,
       Robert

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