You think my questions are naive.

I’m sorry. No. I dont. The failure doesnt lie with the querent.

Is he a prominent mathematician? Your friend.

Grothendieck. He’s widely regarded as the foremost mathematician of the twentieth century. If you ignore the fact that Hilbert and Poincaré and Dedekind and Cantor all lived into the twentieth century. Which you should, since all their major work was done in the nineteenth. And I’m not all that big a fan of von Neumann.

I’m sorry but I dont know those names.

I know. It’s all right. Well, not really. But it’s okay.

Grothendieck.

Yes.

Did you work with him?

I dont know if you would call it work. We spent a lot of time talking. He would come to the Institute on Tuesdays. And I spent a lot of time at his house. I would eat with the family. Then the conversations would go on into the night. In a sense we were just in the same nuthouse together. The Institute had been established for him and another mathematician named Dieudonné by a wealthy Russian named Motchane—if that in fact was his real name—who was mad as a hatter. It was modeled after the IAS. At Princeton. Oppenheimer was an advisor. I was there for a year, but at that time the funds had begun to dry up. In the end I never got all of my fellowship money. I was the only woman there. At first they thought I worked in the kitchen.

I take it it was not a good experience.

It was fantastic. Even at Chicago I’d had a certain amount of trouble. But Grothendieck would listen to every word you said. Nodding and scribbling on his pad. Talking. Asking you questions you hadnt asked yourself.

How old were you?

Seventeen.

And that wasnt an issue. Your age.

It wouldnt even occur to him.

Why doesnt he write?

Mostly because he’s given up mathematics.

As have you.

Yes. As have I.

Was that hard?

Well. I think maybe it’s harder to lose just one thing than to lose everything.

One thing could be everything.

Yes. It could. Mathematics was all we had. It’s not like we gave up mathematics and took up golf. Now he gets invited to seminars to talk and he shows up and rants about the environment or the warmongers. His parents were political activists. He’s very devoted to their memory. He has a pencil drawing of his father on his desk and what I’m told is a deathmask of his mother. But the truth is that they abandoned him as a child to pursue their political dream of a world that will never be and my guess is that he felt compelled to take up their cause in order to justify their betrayal of him. He’s married and has children. And I’m afraid that he’ll do the same thing.

Are you crying?

I’m sorry.

But he gave it all up.

Yes.

Why?

His friends believe that he has become increasingly unstable mentally.