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Category: stories

Brancusi’s advice : avoid vampires

My one and only resolution for 2018: ban vampires from my life!

Here’s the story.

In the 1920’s, Montparnasse was at the heart of the intellectual and artistic life in Paris because studios and cafés were inexpensive.

Artists including Picasso, Matisse, Zadkine, Modigliani, Dali, Chagall, Miro, and the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi all lived there.

You’ll find many photographs of Picasso in the company of others (here center, with Modigliani and Salmon), but … not with Brancusi.

From A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Vol 3) by John Richardson:

“Brancusi disapproved of one of of Picasso’s fundamental characteristics—one that was all too familiar to the latter’s fellow artists and friends—his habit of making off not so much with their ideas as with their energy. “Picasso is a cannibal,” Brancusi said. He had a point. After a pleasurable day in Picasso’s company, those present were apt to end up suffering from collective nervous exhaustion. Picasso had made off with their energy and would go off to his studio and spend all night living off it. Brancusi hailed from vampire country and knew about such things, and he was not going to have his energy or the fruits of his energy appropriated by Picasso.”

I learned this story via Austin Kleon who made this video about it:


Show Your Work! Episode 1: Vampires from Austin Kleon on Vimeo.

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A Math(Art)y 2018

Last night, on our way to the fireworks in Antwerp, we walked by this definition of prime numbers:

“The numbers, only divisible by $1$ and itself are: $2,3$ and every number before or after a multiple of $6$, without their squares or products.” (Peter Wynen)

True enough.

And a lot more user-friendly than: the generators of the multiplicative monoid of all natural numbers which are $\pm 1$ modulo $6$ are the prime numbers, except for $2$ and $3$.

I wish you a 2018 full of math (and artistic) pleasures.

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Grothendieck’s gallery No. 154

Since mid May the Montpellier part of Grothendieck’s gribouillis are online and for everyone available at the Archives Grothendieck.

The story is well-known.

End of June 1990, Grothendieck phoned Jean Malgoire warning him to come asap if he wanted to safeguard the better part of G’s mathematical archive, for he was making a bonfire…

A second handover apparently took place on July 28th 1995.

Malgoire kept these notes (in huge Pampers boxes!) until 2010 when he got cold feet as a result of Grothendieck’s letter. He then donated the boxes to the University of Montpellier in 2012.

After Grothendieck’s death in 2014, Montpellier started a project to scan each and every page and put them online, with the backing of Grothendieck’s children (and generous financial support from the local authorities).

So here we are now, and… nobody seems to care.

I’m aware only of this post on MathOverflow by someone who wants to LaTex some of the material on motives.

Perhaps this is due to the less than optimal presentation of the material, or more likely, Grothendieck’s terrible handwriting. Perhaps the University of Montpellier should partner up with the (older generation of) French pharmacists.

But then, there’s this artistic gem in the archive: cote 154 systemes the pseudo-droites written in 1983-84.

It is written on ancient matrix-plotter page. Here’s a typical example

Which mathematical department wouldn’t want to acquire a framed version of one of these original pages?

That’s the point I wanted to make early may in this G+-post, hoping to raise money to safeguard the Lasserre part of Grothendieck’s gribouillis.

When in need for a header picture, I’ll use a page of Grothendieck’s gallery No 154 from now on.

Here’s evidence that Grothendieck was working on GUTS! (literally).

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