2. History Born 28 March 1928 is a mathematician and the central figure behind the creation of the modern theory of algebraic geometry. His research program vastly extended the scope of the field, incorporating major elements of commutative algebra, homological algebra, sheaf theory, and category theory into its foundations. This new perspective led to revolutionary advances across many areas of pure mathematics.
3. World War 2 In 1939 Grothendieck came to France and lived in various camps for displaced persons with his mother, first at the Camp de Rieucros, and subsequently lived for the remainder of the war in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where he was sheltered and hidden in local boarding-houses or pensions.
4. Studies After the war, the young Grothendieck studied mathematics in France, initially at the University of Montpellier. After three years of increasingly independent studies there he got a scholarship to go to continue his studies in Paris in 1948.
5. Grothendieck attended Henri Cartan's Seminar at École Normale Supérieure, but lacked the necessary background to follow the high-powered seminar. On the advice of Cartan and Weil, he moved to the University of Nancy where he wrote his dissertation under Laurent Schwartz in functional analysis, from 1950 to 1953. At this time he was a leading expert in the theory of topological vector spaces. By 1957, he set this subject aside in order to work in algebraic geometry and homological algebra.
