Translated from french by Grok

With your book, I’ve been able, to some extent, to better discover the person hiding behind the signature on those mathematical articles and reflections on mathematics that had thrilled me. Let me say right away: your freshness of spirit is at least as great as Hadamard’s—as one can see from the very first chapter of your book, through your subtle remarks on teaching.

Your character, a true “book rat,” immediately appealed to me, all the more so because it’s paired with a highly critical nature, as evidenced by your analysis of the “Manifesto of the 93.” How many times have I thought that you were the contemporary mathematician who most embodied the notion of intellectual freedom—and it was with genuine pleasure that I learned—thanks to your account of your weekly encounters with Vessiot on the stairs of the Hautes Études—that this trait was already present in you at an early age.

I was surprised to find that your explanations about the composition of your doctoral jury shed unexpected light on the opinion French mathematicians held of number theory. As for your doctoral thesis itself—or at least what you write about it—it is worthy of praise; these are the words of a wise man, not a saint! And mathematical history is on your side. On the other hand, what’s funny is that you never would have obtained your degree if your examiners had shared your own opinion about publication.

I found your adventure with the “decomposition theorem” extremely instructive, in the sense that it is generic: the student (in this case, you!) practically suffocates with enthusiasm for their discovery, while the same work elicits only restrained interest from the masters. A phenomenon typical of research: the expert is critical precisely because they have an acute awareness of the difficulty, while the novice confronts the unknown precisely because they are unaware of it.

The quality of your account of India—where your determination to integrate in terms of food, clothing, and especially culture is remarkable—rivals that of any specialist, and I congratulate you on having such an open mind that you chose Vijayaraghavan based on his articles rather than his diplomas.

It’s amusing—one point among others—because you say that the compartmentalization into castes is not hierarchical in essence, yet a few lines later you add that, in your view, Western societies have never been so rigorously stratified!

I completely agree with your explanation of the similar abundance of Jews and Brahmins in the hard sciences—for Jews, Flato thinks the same thing.

The fifth chapter, where you describe the genesis of Bourbaki, is—as it should be—delightful. And the legends swirling around the Master weigh even more heavily in our memories when written by one of the forces that brought them into being. Even if not everyone agrees on the style and thus the form, the fact remains that you were the pioneers of theme-based seminars and of the idea of real congresses designed to create rather than to show off. Not to mention, of course, the incomparable writing method.

I think it’s unnecessary for me to dwell on the honorable—and with just a touch of Quixotic—nature of your role in the “war of the medals.” As for the article “French Science,” it is one of those I mentioned at the beginning of my letter.

In the chapter on the war, your natural frankness permeates your entire vocabulary: you use the words of the French language at every register, without any facetiousness or hypocrisy. The long excerpts you provide from your correspondence—the only link to the outside world while you were in prison—cannot be read without some emotion, even if you make an effort to emphasize the benign and amusing side of the affair. In any case, your conditions were quite different from those poor Galois had to endure.

In the end, one can say that you were very lucky: being Jewish, often a foreigner, and too good a mathematician for many people’s taste, your life could easily have been cut short.

Post to X