mostly MCMC’s back

Ocean’s missing .003 seconds [blue wave#11]

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free Paul Watson

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The Guardian on [and on and on] Grothendieck

A very looong piece in The Guardian of 31 August relates the life and achievements of Grothendieck in a highly romanticized way, hinting at hidden secrets contained in the tens of thousands of pages he wrote during his 26 years of retirement in Lasserre, Pyrénées… (Even when acknowledging that Grothendieck’s life and personality are providing enough fodder for a whole series of novels!)

“Grothendieck’s genius defied his attempts at erasing his own renown. He lurks in the background of one of Cormac McCarthy’s final novels, Stella Maris, as an éminence grise who leads on its psychically disturbed mathematician protagonist.”

With very little about maths, apart the mumbo-jumbo usually associated with non-specialists trying to convey the unique ability of a researcher with images and allegories aplenty! The only factual information is that Huawei sees worth in Grothendieck’s concept of topos (within his general theory of categories) toward future AIs and that they hired French 2002 Fields medalist Laurent Lafforgue to explore this subject (besides not mentioning Huawei creating an algebraic geometry chair at the IHÉS, the very place Grothendieck resigned from due to IHÉS receiving military funds).

“Applied to AI, toposes could allow computers to move beyond the data associated with, say, an apple; the geometric coordinates of how it appears in images, for example, or tagging metadata. Then AI could begin to identify objects more like we do – through a deeper “semantic” understanding of what an apple is. But practical application to create the next generation of “thinking” AI is, according to Lafforgue, some way off.”

The author of the Guardian piece, Phil Hoad, is also very reserved about the ultimate purpose of Huawei in funding this research (and the new Centre Lagrange in the centre of Paris), for its obscure links with the Chinese Government and the Chinese military, a concern also expressed by some French mathematicians who signed a tribune in 2021 calling for a boycott of the Centre… But leaving open the door open on whether or not the unexplored thousands of pages blackened by Grothendieck could contain mathematical gems, rather than esoteric ramblings aggravated by his complete shunning of society. Which sounds quite unlikely.

Ocean’s three [blue wave#10]