Alexander Grothendieck is widely regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century.
Then he did something almost unimaginable.
In 1991, he burned many of his own papers, withdrew from the world, and disappeared into a small village in the Pyrenees.
For the last two decades of his life, he lived without a phone, without an address, and almost without human contact. Even neighbors knew him only as an eccentric retired professor.
He didn't drift away from mathematics. He walked away from it for good!
Late in life, he became absorbed by spirituality, environmental concerns, and the search for deeper meaning.
5 million humanoid robots working 24/7 can build Manhattan in ~6 months. now just imagine what the world looks like when we have 10 billion of them by 2045. now imagine the year 2100.
Britain now arrests more people for social media posts than China, Russia, and Turkey combined nearly matching the rest of the top 10 countries combined
Britain really leads the world on these thought crimes
Insane how the UK, which used to be a free country, turned out to be so totalitarian
A collaborative math project, started by Terence Tao, showed that mathematics could be conducted experimentally, and worked on by large groups of mathematicians at once. In doing so, it turned up something genuinely new.
https://t.co/alhsq5Mm8b
@fermatslibrary mathematics suffers from the need for an efficient methodology in parallel with formal axiomatic systems, as human cognition is somehow capable of reaching truths without strictly relying on the rules of logic. logic is, afaics, a highly inefficient and unnatural way of thinking.