neverendingbooks Posts

For me this quest is over. All i did was following breadcrumbs left by others.

Fellow-travelers arrived there before. What did they do next?

The people from the esoteric site L’Astrée, write literary texts on Grothendieck, mixing strange details (such as the kiosque de la place Pinel, the village of Fougax-et-Barrineuf and even ‘Winnie’ or ‘Fred le Belge, notre indic vers Grothendieck’) with genuine finds, such as this ‘petite annonce’ in the journal for this le 09

which reads:

“RETRAITE (PROFESSEUR UNIVERSITE) CHERCHE -eau de vie de pays pour mes préparations de plantes. Ecrire à M. Grothendieck.”

Caterine Aira makes a movie

Most of you will be perfectly happy to know Grothendieck lives in a tiny village close to the market-town of Saint-Girons. A few may click through the map below to satisfy their need to know the name of ‘le petit village de l’Ariège’.

To do what exactly, i wonder.

You can write a letter, but it will be returned unopened.

You can email ‘la Mairie’ (btw. it’s the ‘orange’-address rather than the ‘wanadoo’ ones), but i doubt they’ll update their Wikipedia-page to acknowledge Grothendieck among the ‘Personnalités liées à la commune’.

You can go there in person to hear the villagers out, but, until you’re a ‘résident permanent’, you will be considered an outsider, and treated as one.

If it’s knowledge you’re after, Grothendieck made it plain he no longer wants to be part of the mathematical society.

His mathematical brain is scattered in the 20.000 pages, kept in 5 boxes at the university of Montpellier. This is the genuine treasure, and should be made public without further delay.

I trust you’ll proceed wisely.

To ‘Monsieur Alexandre’, on his 85th birthday:
happier days!

Previous in this series:
– Vendargues
– Mormoiron
– Massy
– Olmet-et-Villecun
– un petit village de l’Ariège
– Saint-Girons
‘

We would love to conclude this series by finding the location of the “final” Grothendieck-spot, before his 85th birthday, this thursday.

But, the road ahead will be treacherous, with imaginary villages along the way and some other traps planted by the nice people of the Grothendieck Fan Club

It is well-known that some members (if not all) of the GFC know the exact location of Grothendieck’s hideout in the Pyrenees. Trying to pry this information from them, pledging to keep the name secret, is described as ‘solving an equation in n unknowns’ in the article Le trésor oublié du génie des maths (h/t +David Roberts):

“Cela fait aujourd’hui vingt-deux ans qu’il vit reclus au pied des Pyrénées, dans un village où personne ne va par hasard et dont le nom doit rester secret. Il le souhaite et ceux qui, de loin, le protègent le souhaitent également. Obtenir l’adresse contre l’assurance de ne pas le déranger prend le temps de résoudre une équation à «n» inconnues. Se poster devant chez lui permet de constater qu’il est bien vivant au milieu d’un village qui le regarde comme «le savant» sans chercher à en savoir plus. A 84 ans, il vient se chauffer au soleil devant son portail puis rentre dans sa maison où nul ne pénètre.”

As we don’t want to take this vow of secrecy, we will have to rely on the few hints they left in the literature. Presumably, the most trustworthy information is to be found in Pierre Cartier’s paper A country of which nothing is known but the name, Grothendieck and “motives”:

“As I already said, he retired in 1988, and has lived since then in self-imposed exile. At first he lived near the Fontaine de Vaucluse, in the middle of a little vineyard that he cultivated, and near to his daughter Johanna and his grandchildren. But later he broke off every family relation. He didn’t seem to mind that the place where he lived was located so near to the infamous Camp du Vernet which played a sad role in his childhood. He lived for years without any contact with the outside world and only a few people even knew where he was. He chose to live alone, considered by his neighbors as a “retired mathematics professor who’s a bit mad”.”

There is a small (but for our purposes important) addition to the first sentence in the French version:

“… il a pris sa retraite en 1988, et vit depuis un exil intérieur dans un petit village de l’Ariège.”

This addition makes our quest a bit more ‘doable’. The department of l’Ariège is one of the lesser populated ones in France (having less that 150.000 inhabitants), and has ‘only’ 332 villages.

One can divide this number roughly by 2, leaving out the larger villages and towns and those situated in the higher mountains, where living must be extremely difficult for an 85 year old.

An alternative reason for leaving out the more southern villages is Cartier’s claim that ‘le petit village’ is close to the Camp du Vernet, which is the place from which Grothendieck’s father was deported to Auschwitz.

This former concentration camp is located in Le Vernet, close to the town of Pamiers (central upper part of the map).

So, one can safely assume that the final G-spot must lie on the map below (click on it to navigate and explore).

Previous in this series:
– Vendargues
– Mormoiron
– Massy
– Olmet-et-Villecun

Before we start the quest for the final G-spot, hopefully in time for Grothendieck’s 85th birthday, one more post on Alexandre’s ‘hippy-days’.

In the second part of Allyn Jackson’s “The Life of Alexandre Grothendieck” she tells the story that AG, while touring the US to spread the gospel of the eco-mouvement “Survivre et Vivre” (the deal was that he gave 1 math-talk if he was allowed to give another one on ecology/politics), met a graduate student of Daniel Gorenstein, Justine Skalba, who quickly became a G-groupie and returned with him after the US-trip to France, where she lived with him for two years (and had one child with him, John, who later also became a mathematician).

Allyn Jackson writes:

“In early 1973 he (AG) and Skalba moved to Olmet-le-sec (probably she means: Olmet sec, so without any additions), a rural village in the south of France. This area was at the time a magnet for hippies and others in the counterculture movement who wanted to return to a simpler lifestyle close at hand (I would have added: and, it still is). Here Grothendieck again attempted (he did this once before in his Parisian period, setting up a commune in Chatenay-Malabry) to start up a commune, but personality conflicts led to its collapse. At various times three of Grothendieck’s children came to live in the Paris commune and in the one in Olmet (probably this being: Johanna, Mathieu and Alexandre who even today maintain an alternative lifestyle). After the commune disolved, he moved with Skalba and his children to Villecum, a short distance away.”

As Yves Ladegaillerie tells Jackson, Grothendieck lived an ascetic, unconventional life in an old house without electricity in Villecun, about thirty-five miles outside of Montpellier. Ladegaillerie remembered seeing Justine Skalba and her baby there. Many friends, acquantances and students went to visit Grothendieck there, including people from the ecology movement.

Here’s the (in)famous house in Villecun (h/t Winfried Scharlau)

And, if you are a bit like me, wanting to see everything with G-earth or maps, here’s the scenery (click on the image to be there).

Again, if someone at the Mairie d’Olmet-et-Villecun reads this, please consider adding to your list of ‘Personnalités liées à la commune’

– Michel Chevalier
– Paul Dardé

this one:

– Alexandre Grothendieck

Merci infiniment!

Previous in this series:

– Vendargues
– Mormoiron
– Massy

One week from now, Alexandre Grothendieck will turn 85. Today, we’ll have a glance at his ‘wilder years’, the early 70ties, when he resigned from the IHES and became one of the leading figures in the French eco-movement. This iconic picture is from those days

The text reads:

“Schurik entre les “frères ennemis” Gaston Galan et Dyama, rue Polonceau.
Derrière, Chantal et Motito (femme et fille de Gaston).”

Schurik (that is, AG) between the ‘hostile brothers’ Gaston Galan and Dyama in the ‘rue Polonceau’. Behind, Chantal and Motito (wife and daughter of Gaston).

However, if you stroll down the Rue Polonceau via StreetView (note to self: high time to revisit Paris IRL) it is unclear where this picture might have been taken. One notable exception perhaps, at 38, Rue Polonceau.

Today, this address houses the feminist group Ruptures with the noble goal to establish a society based on a genuine equality between women and men.

“L’association se donne pour objectif de substituer à la société patriarcale une société fondée sur une égalité réelle et pas seulement formelle entre les femmes et les hommes dans le domaine économique, social, politique et culturel. Elle est basée sur la laïcité et la parité.”

Besides, they want to encourage cooperation with other movements striving for a better world:

“Convergences des luttes féministes, altermondialistes, écologistes, antiracistes”

It is thus very well possible that this address was already used in the 70ties by similar social groups, such as the ecological movement “Survivre et Vivre” (Survive and Live), a movement founded in 1970 by three renowned mathematicians: Grothendieck, Claude Chevalley and Pierre Samuel. The origins and evolution of Survivre et Vivre are nicely described on this page at Science et Société.

So, whoever wrote that text beneath the photograph is probably right, though I’d love to hear more details. Still, this picture was the first thing on my mind when i found the place where Grothendieck lived in his IHES-years (and shortly afterwards).

The first issue of the Bulletin of Survivre et Vivre (btw. most issues are available from the Grothendieck circle and are fun reading material if you are, like me, in constant need to brush up your French) concludes with a list of the names, professions and addresses of the group’s members (25 at the time, including AG’s mother-in-law (Julienne Dufour, mother of his wife Mireille Dufour) and his son (from another mother) Serge):

So, here we are, Grothendieck lived with his wife, children (apart from Serge who was at the time based in Nice) and mother-in-law at 2, Avenue de Verrières, Massy, France

If you click on the picture, you can walk around this G-spot. Thanks to Igor Babou (see comments), for correcting me on this G-spot. From Igor’s comment:

“Actually, the AG ex house is not exactly located on the street: its door is at the opposite of the Verriere avenue, in front of the Massy Station. The house seems to be unoccupied, and has no name on its mailbox. All the blinds were closed. I just saw a bill saying “security camera”… not very “Grothendieck spirit”…

Here you will see the green portal of the house, surrounded by the big trees and between the two cars. Unfortunalety, the house is hard to see from the street, and google hasn’t done any picture of it.”

If some of you have better info on this or other Grothendieck-spots, please fill me in.
I’m bound to travel south, possibly in search for more information, end of next week…

Previous in this series:
– Vendargues
– Mormoiron

With Grothendieck’s 85th brithday coming up, march 28th, we continue our rather erratic quest to locate the spots that once meant a lot to him.

Ever wondered what Grothendieck’s last-known hideout looked like? Well, here’s the answer:
(h/t gruppe eM)

And, here’s the story.

One of the stranger stories to be found on the web is the Grothendieck quest by Roy Lisker. In 1988, after AG declined the Crafoord Prize, Roy convinced an editor of Le Nouvel Observateur to hire him to uncover the whereabouts of Alexandre Grothendieck and, if possible, to interview him.

The ‘quest’ is an hilarious account of Roy’s attempts to prise AG’s address out of the people from the Montpellier maths department, his subsequent travels and stay at Grothendieck’s place.

He put the text online in 2008 and made it intentionally opaque wrt. AG’s phone number and address:

“His phone, if in fact this notorious hermit bothered with such contrivances, was unlisted.”

“…of his adopted village of Lessmoiron (after a 20 year silence it is permissible to reveal its name) , in the department of the Vacluse, a region of France long habituated to the herbergement of exiled or alienated Popes.”

By that time the Grothendieck-Serre correspondence had been published for over 4 years, including a letter dated 2 september 1984, giving away this ‘secret information’:

So, not only do we have a phone number (today it would be 0033(0)4 90 61 88 30), but also that AG lived in the hamlet “Les Aumettes” in the village of Mormoiron (and not ‘Less’moiron, duh), close to the famous (to any bicyclist) Mont Ventoux.

From Roy’s quest we learn that it is about 3 kms from the center of Mormoiron and that
“Grothendieck’s cottage was built up against a hillside, it’s conical shape hugging the hill like the helmet of a medieval knight. The lower entrance was graced by a pair of sturdy French windows. Above these, at the level of the attic, two tiny rectangular windows filtered light into the bedroom.”

If you want to explore the immediate neighborhood of Les Aumettes, click on the picture below (bonus points for anyone who is able to pinpoint the exact location on the map).

If someone at the Mairie de Mormoiron reads this, please consider adding to your list of ‘Personnalités liées à la commune’

– Raymond Guilhem de Budos (? – 1363), neveu de Clément V, seigneur de Clermont, Lodève, Budos,Beaumes-de-Venise, Bédoin, Caromb, Entraigues, Loriol et Mormoiron, gouverneur de Bénévent, Maréchal de la Cour pontificale et Recteur du Comtat Venaissin de 1310 à 1317.
– Guillaume-Emmanuel-Joseph, baron Guilhem de Sainte-Croix, (1746-1809), membre de l’Institut, auteur d’un essai Examen critique des anciens historiens d’Alexandrie, couronné par l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres en 177224.
– Paul Vialis, ancien maire de Moirmoiron ou il est né en 1848, et député de Vaucluse.
– Albert Schou (da), (27 mars 1849 – 4 février 1900), photographe danois

this one:

– Alexandre Grothendieck (né en 1928), mathématicien français ayant reçu la Médaille Fields.

Merci!

Previous in this series:
– Vendargues

In a couple of days, on march 28th, Alexandre Grothendieck will turn 85.

To mark the occasion we’ll run a little series, tracking down places where he used to live, hoping to entice some of these villages in the south of France to update their Wikipedia-page by adding under ‘Personnalités liées à la commune’ the line

– Alexandre Grothendieck (né en 1928), mathématicien français ayant reçu la Médaille Fields.

as did the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where Grothendieck was kept safe from 1942-1945, separated from his mother who was send to an internment camp (his father was deported by the French authorities in august 1942 and killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz).

After the war, Alexandre was reunited with his mother and, according to Allyn Jackson’s As If Summoned from the Void: The Life of Alexandre Grothendieck, they “went to live in Maisargues, a village in the wine-growing region outside of Montpellier”.

Amir Aczel adds to this in his book The artist and the mathematician, the story of Nicolas Bourbaki: “From 1945 until 1948, mother and son lived in the small hamlet of Mairargues, virtually hidden among the vineyards, a dozen kilometers from Montpellier. They had a marvelous small garden: they never had to work at gardening and yet the earth was so fertile, and the rains so abundant, that the garden produced a plentiful harvest of figs, spinach, and tomatoes. Their garden was at the verge of splendid poppies. Grothendieck remembers his time there with his mother as “la belle vie”.”

But, there is no Maisargues nor Mairargues to be found in France.

There is the village of Caissargues, close to Nimes, about 50 kms from Montpellier, and, there is the village of Meyrargues, close to Pertuis, more than 170 kms from Montpellier.

So, where is the hamlet of “la belle vie”?

Jackson’s and Aczel’s info is based on a footnote in Grothendieck’s Recoltes et semailles (in fact, Aczel’s text is a mere translation of it):

“Entre 1945 et 1948, je vivais avec ma mère dans un petit hameau à une dizaine de kilomètres de Montpellier, Mairargues (par Vendargues), perdu au milieu des vignes. (Mon père avait disparu à Auschwitz, en 1942.) On vivait chichement sur ma maigre bourse d’étudiant. Pour arriver à joindre les deux bouts, je faisais les vendanges chaque année, et après les vendanges, du vin de grapillage, que j’arrivais à écouler tant bien que mal (en contravention, paraît-il, de la législation en vigueur. . . ) De plus il y avait un jardin qui, sans avoir à le travailler jamais, nous fournissait en abondance figues, épinards et même (vers la fin) des tomates, plantées par un voisin complaisant au beau milieu d’une mer de splendides pavots. C’était la belle vie.”

Although Grothendieck misspells Mayrargues, he points to the village of Vendargues which is situated 12 kms east of Montpellier and has a hamlet called Mayrargues (foto above). Via Google Maps you can visit “l’hameau de la belle vie” by yourself (it even has streetview).

If someone at the Mairie de Vendargues comes across this post, please consider adding to your list of famous (former) inhabitants:

– Marcelin Albert (1851-1921), séjourne au mazet de Montmaris, leader de la révolte viticole, est le parrain de Marcellin Guille né en 1907 et oncle d’Archiguille.
– Sabri Allouani (1978-), raseteur (Septuple Vainqueur du Championnat de France de la Course Camarguaise au As 2000-2007)
– Archiguille (Augustin François Guille, peintre contemporain “Transfigurations”) vivant en Suisse.
– Laurent Ballesta (1974-), Biologiste marin, plongeur, photographe, collaborateur de Nicolas Hulot)
– Le général Pierre Berthezène (1775-1847), baron d’Empire, pair de France (1775-1847)
– Jerôme Bonnisel (joueur de football professionnel)
– le baron Pierre Le Roy de Boiseaumarié, (1890-1967), fondateur des appellations d’origine contrôlées, vigneron à Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

this one:

– Alexandre Grothendieck (né en 1928), mathématicien français ayant reçu la Médaille Fields.

Thanks!