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

[Chandler Davis]

Let me put in a word.  The Mathematical Intelligencer is another
periodical which is not planning to publish an obituary of
Alexander Grothendieck (though I have a good deal of affection
for him and do think his death is a significant event for the
community); our reason is different, it's just that The
Intelligencer has a much longer pre-publication delay than many
other magazines do.  The challenge Mumford and Tate took up was
daunting and twofold: to write something that could be read with
understanding by biologists who hadn't used mathematics much,
even simple math terminology, for forty years; and to write an
indication of what was novel about Grothendieck's approach to
algebraic geometry.  The editors of Nature shouldn't be presumed
to have rejected the article on the basis that the authors had
set the bar too high for the non-mathematical biologist reader;
they may have thought that even for the reader for whom "group"
and "polynomial" were not barriers to comprehension, the sketch
of schemes etc --necessarily QUITE a sketchy sketch-- would be.
Granting the editors the right to try to do their difficult job
independently, I still think the authors have a right to feel
miffed, having responded to an invitation and made a creditable
attempt at a difficult task.

Chandler



On Wed, 17 Dec 2014, Robert Dawson wrote:

> 
> 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
> 
> 
>