If there is one thing in mathematics that fascinates me more than anything else (and doubtless always has), it is neither "number" nor "size", but al…

- Alexander Grothendieck

Discovery is the privilege of the child: the child who has no fear of being once again wrong, of looking like an idiot, of not being serious, of not …

- Alexander Grothendieck

A different image came to me a few weeks ago. The unknown thing to be known appeared to me as some stretch of earth or hard marl, resisting penetrati…

- Alexander Grothendieck

The question you raise, 'How can such a formulation lead to computations?' doesn't bother me in the least! Throughout my whole life as a mathematicia…

- Alexander Grothendieck

I am not really doing research, just trying to cultivate myself.

- Alexander Grothendieck

The introduction of the cipher 0 or the group concept was general nonsense too, and mathematics was more or less stagnating for thousands of years be…

- Alexander Grothendieck