Alexander Grothendieck

His father, Alexander "Sascha" Schapiro (also known as Alexander Tanaroff), had Hasidic Jewish roots and had been imprisoned in Russia before moving to Germany in 1922, while his mother, Johanna "Hanka" Grothendieck, came from a Protestant German family in Hamburg and worked as a journalist.

As teenagers, both of his parents had broken away from their early backgrounds.

At the time of his birth, Grothendieck's mother was married to the journalist Johannes Raddatz and initially, his birth name was recorded as "Alexander Raddatz."

Alexander Grothendieck (28 March 1928 – 13 November 2014) was a German-born mathematician who became the leading figure in the creation of modern algebraic geometry.

His research extended the scope of the field and added elements of commutative algebra, homological algebra, sheaf theory, and category theory to its foundations, while his so-called "relative" perspective led to revolutionary advances in many areas of pure mathematics.

He is considered by many to be the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century.

That marriage was dissolved in 1929 and Schapiro acknowledged his paternity, but never married Hanka Grothendieck.

Grothendieck had a maternal sibling, his half sister Maidi.

Grothendieck lived with his parents in Berlin until the end of 1933, when his father moved to Paris to evade Nazism.

His mother followed soon thereafter.

Grothendieck was left in the care of Wilhelm Heydorn, a Lutheran pastor and teacher in Hamburg.

According to Winfried Scharlau, during this time, his parents took part in the Spanish Civil War as non-combatant auxiliaries.

However, others state that Schapiro fought in the anarchist militia.

In Le Chambon, Grothendieck attended the Collège Cévenol (now known as the Le Collège-Lycée Cévenol International), a unique secondary school founded in 1938 by local Protestant pacifists and anti-war activists.

Many of the refugee children hidden in Le Chambon attended Collège Cévenol, and it was at this school that Grothendieck apparently first became fascinated with mathematics.

In May 1939, Grothendieck was put on a train in Hamburg for France.

Shortly afterward his father was interned in Le Vernet.

He and his mother were then interned in various camps from 1940 to 1942 as "undesirable dangerous foreigners."

His father was arrested under the Vichy anti-Jewish legislation, and sent to the Drancy internment camp, and then handed over by the French Vichy government to the Germans to be sent to be murdered at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942.

After three years of increasingly independent studies there, he went to continue his studies in Paris in 1948.

Initially, Grothendieck attended Henri Cartan's Seminar at École Normale Supérieure, but he lacked the necessary background to follow the high-powered seminar.

On the advice of Cartan and André Weil, he moved to the University of Nancy where two leading experts were working on Grothendieck's area of interest, topological vector spaces: Jean Dieudonné and Laurent Schwartz.

The latter had recently won a Fields Medal.

He showed his new student his latest paper; it ended with a list of 14 open questions, relevant for locally convex spaces.

Grothendieck introduced new mathematical methods that enabled him to solve all of these problems within a few months.

Grothendieck began his productive and public career as a mathematician in 1949.

In Nancy, he wrote his dissertation under those two professors on functional analysis, from 1950 to 1953.

The first camp was the Rieucros Camp, where his mother contracted the tuberculosis that would eventually cause her death in 1957.

While there, Grothendieck managed to attend the local school, at Mendel. Once, he managed to escape from the camp, intending to assassinate Hitler.

Later, his mother Hanka was transferred to the Gurs internment camp for the remainder of World War II.

Grothendieck was permitted to live separated from his mother.

In the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, he was sheltered and hidden in local boarding houses or pensions, although he occasionally had to seek refuge in the woods during Nazi raids, surviving at times without food or water for several days.

In 1958, he was appointed a research professor at the Institut des hautes études scientifiques (IHÉS) and remained there until 1970, when, driven by personal and political convictions, he left following a dispute over military funding.

He received the Fields Medal in 1966 for advances in algebraic geometry, homological algebra, and K-theory.

He later became professor at the University of Montpellier and, while still producing relevant mathematical work, he withdrew from the mathematical community and devoted himself to political and religious pursuits (first Buddhism and later, a more Catholic Christian vision).

In 1990, for risking their lives to rescue Jews, the entire village was recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations".

After the war, the young Grothendieck studied mathematics in France, initially at the University of Montpellier where at first he did not perform well, failing such classes as astronomy.

Working on his own, he rediscovered the Lebesgue measure.

In 1991, he moved to the French village of Lasserre in the Pyrenees, where he lived in seclusion, still working on mathematics and his philosophical and religious thoughts until his death in 2014.

Grothendieck was born in Berlin to anarchist parents.