Alexander Grothendieck: A Country Known Only by Name
inference-review.comA layter version (this pdf is cited as [34])
http://inference-review.com/article/a-country-known-only-by-...
Thanks! Url (belatedly) changed from http://xahlee.info/math/i/Alexander_Grothendieck_cartier.pdf.
Yes! If you're interested, read this instead. The organization and writing has been cleaned up.
The Grothendieck song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ1S3tFaImo
The title here is absolutely useless. For those who are curious, the article is a biography of Alexander Grothendieck, a mathematician.
Those of you who complain about the title... I can only wonder if you have any poetry in your souls.
Yes, it helps to know that Grothendieck was a big-deal mathematician ("considered by many to be the greatest mathematician of the 20th century").
But what, did you think that "No Country For Old Men" was going to be about geriatrics without passports?
When people quote Hartley's "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there", do you go looking for "Yesterday" in an atlas?
Closer to home, after I read Yegge's Execution In The Kingdom Of Nouns I tried to book a vacation there, but the travel agent made fun of me.
Ouch! I suppose you're the guy who came up with title?
For me, the issue was that I didn't know what a "Grothendieck" was and the title doesn't give you any clues either; in fact it explicitly denies that any exist.
It also flouts the convention for fanciful non-fiction titles, which is something like "Clever-or-poetic-part: plain description." Something like "A country of which nothing is known but the name: Grothendieck and mathematical motivation" would be better, I think.
> Ouch! I suppose you're the guy who came up with title?
Ouch! The only possible reason for defending it.
Or maybe, just maybe, it could have been about some actual forgotten country where only name of a city or something survived?
Obviously you can use whatever title you want and be as poetic as you like, but at least in my mind I was going to a very different place than "mathematician".
As for your examples, they don't really fit, since we have way more context about them. If you are going to see a movie with a title "No country for old men", you can be pretty sure that the title wont be literal (unless it's an comedy movie, in which case it might be). As for the quote, most people get that "past" is past and not some place and certainly they are not going to start looking for "yesterday" like you suggest, that's just stupid of you to even suggest. Anyone who is aware that "yesterday" is part of "past" already knows what you are talking about. However most people do not know who or even what Grothendieck, to me it doesn't even seem like a name of a person, but that's just me.
EDIT: You can downvote me all you want, but unless you can come up with coherent response, please think twice why you are downvoting.
Perhaps people expect a title to be either helpful or artful. This one is both less than descriptive and uninteresting. People would probably be be less concerned that it wasn't descriptive if the title was artful or clever.
Yes. Actually.
Thanks - I was certain that the URL and the Title had been messed up - and spent a fruitless 5 or so minutes trying to find the actual article before giving up and coming to the comments. The article has nothing to do with a country.
That was why I clicked through also--I was expecting some sort of historical oddity!
No we should not suffix the name of every person in post titles with their occupation. Grothendieck is one of the most influential mathematicians of the last century. This is like demanding clarifications like "this article is about Mark Zuckerburg, a CEO"
Even if you know who Gronthendieck is, the title is surprisingly unhelpful.
The title invoked in me a state of mystery, which is perhaps exactly the right way to approach this subject.
I agree that the title was intriguing and although I am not fluent in mathematics at the level discussed in the article, I found the biographical sections very interesting and the writing style to be engaging.
Particularly interesting were the comparisons with Boltzmann and Cantor, apparently also "tortured" or at least socially eccentric, geniuses. My understanding of their work is limited but the author of this article seemed to allude to the risks of, or at least correlations with, psychological instability and research at the extreme frontiers of mathematics. (I know this notion is a tired cliche, but still...)
If anyone out there has an understanding of how Grothendieck "deepened the concept of a geometric point" and feels the urge to explain it in layman terms, I have an upvote for you!
As does all clickbait. "You won't believe what happens next!" "Doctors hate her!" Ooh, mysterious, why do doctors hate her?
She was shocked. It's an easy trick, discovered by a mom.
It's literally word for word the title of the linked article, which makes it a reasonable choice for a title, no?
You can tell it's a terrible title because the only comments are discussing the title and not the content of the article
So...having read the article (honestly!), I'm still not sure why this is the title.
He bounced around Europe as a young man (due to WWII), but he did the vast majority of his work in France. However, Wikipedia says he was technically stateless because he held off on applying for French citizenship.
I would guess the title an allusion to that--and his reclusiveness later in life, but I still feel like I'm either missing something or something was lost in translation. Is it a quote or paraphrase of something?
About midway through the article, Cartier (the author) says that "Grothendieck had a taste and a talent for naming things, which he used as a major intellectual strategy. Thus, my title, “A Country Known Only by Name,” is an homage to his way with words."
I agree with others that it's not the most straightforward title he could have used (although I don't think it's the same thing as clickbait). But personally I enjoyed the sense of mystery it lent to an article I might otherwise have skipped.
I read that but the country part still confuses me--it's a very odd way to refer to a person. This made me wonder if it was a reference to something. "No Country for Old Men", for example, is from the first line of "Sailing to Byzantium", a poem by Yeats.
Not necessarily, since the internet is notorious for producing awful article titles. (Although usually they're deliberate clickbait rather than this sort of obscureness.) I believe HN's policy is to change the title if it's confusing or inaccurate.
I'm just baffled why this is getting downvotes. If you don't like HN's policy, complain to dang, not me. If you don't think there's a lot of clickbait on the internet, there's really nothing I can do for you.
When I read the title, I assume Grothendieck is a country. You know, because it says "Grothendieck is a country". So maybe you don't need to say "Grothendieck, the mathematician", but the title is specifically going out of its way to be as unclear as possible.
I literally couldn't tell you even what part of the field he was involved with or when.
Although I could tell you that Zuckerburg made Facebook.
Just because you know something doesn't mean it's common knowledge (or that other people will even care)
Being an influential mathematician doesn't really put you high on most people's awareness.
But you're misstating the problem. If the title had been "A country of which nothing is known but the name Obama", I would still have assumed that it was about a little-known historical nation that happened to share a name with the last US president. It's just a really weird, confusing title.
Well, if all you do is read the title, then what does it matter how confusing it is?
I read the title to decide if the article is worth reading. I'm not sure what you think titles are for.