Lasserre

The great mathematician Alexander Grothendieck lived here from 1988 in isolation until his death in 2014. He is considered by many to be the greatest mathematician of the 20th century.

Alexander Grothendieck was obsessed with good and evil and believed that the Devil rules the univers and has deliberately corrupted the speed of light from the nice round number of 300,000 kilometers per second to 299,792.458 kilometers per second.

He was born on 28 March 1928 and died here on 13 November 2014. He was a French mathematician who became the leading figure in the creation of modern algebraic geometry. Besides a mathematician, Gritendieck was very active on political fronts. Grothendieck's political views were radical and pacifist, and he strongly opposed both United States intervention in Vietnam and Soviet military expansionism. He gave lectures on category theory in the forests surrounding Hanoi while the city was being bombed, to protest against the Vietnam War. He retired from scientific life around 1970, having found out that IHÉS (Institut des hautes études scientifiques, where he worked) was partly funded by the military. In 1991, Grothendieck moved to a new address which he did not provide to his previous contacts in the mathematical community. Very few people visited him afterward. Local villagers helped sustain him with a more varied diet after he tried to live on a staple of dandelion soup. After his death, it was revealed that he lived alone in a house here in Lasserre, Ariège, a small village at the foot of the Pyrenees. On 13 November 2014, aged 86, Grothendieck died in the hospital of Saint-Girons, Ariège.

Dromos