Reminiscences of Grothendieck and His School
Reminiscences of Grothendieck and His School
Reminiscences of Grothendieck and His School
Luc Illusie, with Alexander Beilinson, Spencer Bloch, Vladimir Drinfeld, et al.
uc Illusie, an emeritus professor at the Universit Paris-Sud, was a student of Alexander Grothendieck. On the afternoon of Tuesday, January 30, 2007, Illusie met with University of Chicago mathematicians Alexander Beilinson, Spencer Bloch, and Vladimir Drinfeld, as well as a few other guests, at Beilinsons home in Chicago. Illusie chatted by the reside, recalling memories of his days with Grothendieck. What follows is a corrected and edited version of a transcript prepared by Thanos Papaoannou, Keerthi Madapusi Sampath, and Vadim Vologodsky.
At the IHS
Illusie: I began attending Grothendiecks seminars at the IHS [Institut des Hautes tudes Scientiques] in 1964 for the rst part of SGA 5 (19641965).1 The second part was in 19651966. The seminar was on Tuesdays. It started at 2:15 and lasted one hour and a half. After that we had tea. Most of the talks were given by Grothendieck. Usually, he had pre-notes prepared over the summer or before, and he would give them to the potential speakers. Among his many students he distributed the exposs, and also he asked his students to write down notes. The rst time I saw him I was scared. It was in 1964. I had been introduced to him through Cartan, who said, For what youre doing, you should meet Grothendieck.
Luc Illusie is professor emeritus of mathematics at the Universit Paris-Sud. His email address is luc.illusie@ math.u-psud.fr. Alexander Beilinson is the David and Mary Winton Green University Professor at the University of Chicago. His email address is [email protected]. edu. Spencer Bloch is R. M. Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. His email address is [email protected]. Vladimir Drinfeld is professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago. His email address is drinfeld@math. uchicago.edu.
I was indeed looking for an Atiyah-Singer index formula in a relative situation. A relative situation is of course in Grothendiecks style, so Cartan immediately saw the point. I was doing something with Hilbert bundles, complexes of Hilbert bundles with nite cohomology, and he said, It reminds me of something done by Grothendieck, you should discuss it with him. I was introduced to him by the Chinese mathematician Shih Weishu. He was in Princeton at the time of the Cartan-Schwartz seminar on the Atiyah-Singer formula; there had been a parallel seminar, directed by Palais. We had worked together a little bit on some characteristic classes. And then he visited the IHS. He was friendly with Grothendieck and proposed to introduce me. So, one day at two oclock I went to meet Grothendieck at the IHS, at his oce, which is now, I think, one of the oces of the secretaries. The meeting was in the sitting room which was adjacent to it. I tried to explain what I was doing. Then Grothendieck abruptly showed me some nave commutative diagram and said, Its not leading anywhere. Let me explain to you some ideas I have. Then he made a long speech about niteness conditions in derived categories. I didnt know anything about derived categories! Its not complexes of Hilbert bundles you should consider. Instead, you should work with ringed spaces and pseudocoherent complexes of nite tor-dimension. (laughter)It looked very complicated. But what he explained to me then eventually proved useful in dening what I wanted. I took notes but couldnt understand much. I knew no algebraic geometry at the time. Yet he said, In the fall I am starting a seminar,
1
Cohomologie -adique et fonctions L, Sminaire de Gomtrie Algbrique du Bois-Marie 1965/66, dirig par A. Grothendieck, Lecture Notes in Math. 589, SpringerVerlag, 1977.
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said, I have a few comments on your text. Could you please come to my place, I will explain them to you.
At Grothendiecks Place
Photo courtesy of Friedrich Hirzebruch.
When I met him, to my surprise, my text was blackened with penciled annotations. I thought it was in nal form, but everything had to be changed. In fact, he was right all the time, even for questions of French language. He proposed modications in the style, the organization, everything. So, for my expos on local duality, I was very afraid. However, a month later or so, he said, Ive read your notes. They are okay, but I have a few comments, so could you please come to my place again? That was the beginning of a series of visits to his place. At the time he lived at Bures-sur-Yvette, rue de Moulon, in a little white pavilion, with a ground oor and one story. His oce there was austere and cold in the winter. He had a portrait of his father in pencil, and also on the table there was the mortuary mask of his mother. Behind his desk he had ling cabinets. When he wanted some document, he would just turn back and nd it in no time. He was well organized. We sat together and discussed his remarks on my redactions. We started at two and worked until maybe four oclock, then he said, Maybe we could take a break. Sometimes we took a walk, sometimes we had tea. After that we came back and worked again. Then we had dinner around seven, with his wife, his daughter, and his two sons. The dinner didnt last long. Afterward we met again in his oce, and he liked to explain some maths to me. I remember, one day, he gave me a course on the theory of the fundamental group from several viewpoints, the topological approach, the schemetheoretic one (with the enlarged fundamental group of SGA 3), the topos-theoretic one. I tried to catch up, but it was hard. He was improvising, in his fast and elegant handwriting. He said that he couldnt think without writing. I, myself, would nd it more convenient rst to close my eyes and think, or maybe just lie down, but he could not think this way, he had to take a sheet of paper, and he started writing. He wrote X S , passing the pen several times on it, you see, until the characters and arrow became very thick. He somehow enjoyed the sight of these objects. We usually nished at half past eleven, then he walked with me to the station, and I took the last train back to Paris. All afternoons at his place were like that.
Thorie des topos et cohomologie tale des schmas, Sminaire de gomtrie algbrique du Bois-Marie 1963-64, dirig par M. Artin, A. Grothendieck, J.-L. Verdier, Lecture Notes in Math. 269, 270, 305, Springer-Verlag, 1972, 1973.
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long periods (Tits; Deligne, who attended the seminars since 1965; Tate; and later Kleiman, Katz, Quillen). Then we had tea at four in the drawing room of the IHS. That was a place to meet and discuss. Another one was the lunch at the IHS, to which I decided to come after some time. There you could nd Grothendieck, Serre, Tate discussing motives and other topics that passed well over my head. SGA 6,3 the seminar on RiemannRoch, started in 1966. A little before, Grothendieck said to Berthelot and me, You should give the talks. He handed me some pre-notes on niteness conditions in derived categories and on K -groups. So Berthelot and I gave several talks, and we wrote down notes. In this time, we usually met for lunch, and after lunchthat was very niceGrothendieck would take us for a walk in the woods of the IHS and just casually explain to us what he had been thinking about, what hed been reading. I remember, once he said, Im reading Manins paper on formal groups4 and I think I understand what hes doing. I think one should introduce the notion of slope, and Newton polygon, then he explained to us the idea that the Newton polygon should rise under specialization, and for the rst time he envisioned the notion of crystal. Then at the same time, maybe, or a little later, he wrote his famous letter to Tate: Un cristal possde deux proprits caractristiques : la rigidit, et la facult de crotre, dans un voisinage appropri. Il y a des cristaux de toute espce de substance: des cristaux de soude, de soufre, de modules, danneaux, de schmas relatifs, etc. (A crystal possesses two characteristic properties: rigidity, and the ability to grow in an appropriate neighborhood. There are crystals of all kinds of substances: sodium, sulfur, modules, rings, relative schemes, etc.)
thought about that and was fairly rapidly stuck. Of course, I could write some formula, but only in the tor-independent situation. Im not sure that there is even now in the literature a nice general formula in the non-tor-independent situation.6 For this you need homotopical algebra. You have two rings, and you have to take the derived tensor product of the rings; what you get is an object in the derived category of simplicial rings, or you can view it as a dierential graded algebra in the characteristic 0 case, but the material was not available at the time. In the tor-independent case, the usual tensor product is good. In the general one I was stuck.
SGA 6
I was therefore happy to work with Grothendieck and Berthelot on SGA 6. At the time you didnt have to nish your thesis in three years. The completion of a thse dtat could take seven, eight years. So the pressure was not so great. The seminar, SGA 6, went well, we eventually proved a Riemann-Roch theorem in a quite general context, and Berthelot and I were quite happy. I remember that we tried to imitate Grothendiecks style. When Grothendieck handed me his notes on the niteness conditions in derived categories, I said, This is only over a point. We should do that in a bered category over some topos (laughter). It was a little nave, but, anyway, it proved to be the right generalization. Drinfeld: What is written in the nal version of SGA 6? Is it in this generality? Illusie: Yes, of course. Drinfeld: So, it was your suggestion, not Grothendiecks. Illusie: Yes. Drinfeld: Did he approve it? Illusie: Of course, he liked it. As for Berthelot, he brought original contributions to the K -theory part. Grothendieck had calculated the K0 of a projective bundle. We did not call it K0 at the time; there were a K made with vector bundles and a K made with coherent sheaves, which are now denoted K0 and K 0 . Grothendieck had proved that the K0 of a projective bundle P over X is generated over K0 (X) by the class of OP (1). But he was not happy with that. He said, Sometimes youre not in a quasi-projective situation, you dont have any global resolutions for coherent sheaves. Then its better to work with the K -group dened using perfect complexes. However, he didnt know how to prove the similar result for this other K group. Berthelot thought about the problem, and, adapting to complexes some constructions of Proj made in EGA II for modules, he solved it. He showed that to Grothendieck and then Grothendieck told me, Berthelot est encore plus
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Knneth
Bloch: What about you? What about your part? You must have been thinking about your thesis. Illusie: It was not working so well, I must say. Grothendieck had proposed to me some problems, of course. He said, The second part of EGA III5 is really lousy, there are a dozen spectral sequences abutting to the cohomology of a ber product. Its a mess, so, please, clean this up by introducing derived categories, write the Knneth formula in the general framework of derived categories. I
Thorie des intersections et thorme de RiemannRoch, Sminaire de Gomtrie Algbrique du Bois-Marie 1966/67, dirig par P. Berthelot, A. Grothendieck, L. Illusie, Lecture Notes in Math. 225, Springer-Verlag, 1971. 4 Yu. I. Manin, Theory of commutative formal groups over elds of nite characteristic, Uspehi Mat. Nauk. 18 (1963), no. 6 (114), 390. (Russian) 5 lments de Gomtrie Algbrique, par A. Grothendieck, rdigs avec la collaboration de J. Dieudonn, Pub. Math. IHS 4, 8, 11, 17, 20, 24, 28, 32, and Grundlehren 166, Springer-Verlag, 1971.
3
This issue is discussed again in the section under the heading Cartier, Quillen.
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fonctoris que moi!7(laughter). Grothendieck had given us detailed notes on lambda operations, which he had written before 1960. Berthelot discussed them in his exposs and solved several questions that Grothendieck had not thought about at the time. Bloch: Why did you choose this topic? There was this earlier paper, by Borel and Serre, based on Grothendiecks ideas about Riemann-Roch. Im sure he wasnt happy with that! Illusie: Grothendieck wanted a relative formula over a general base and for fairly general morphisms (locally complete intersection morphisms). Also, he didnt want to move cycles. He preferred to do intersection theory using K -groups. Bloch: But he didnt forget his program of trying to prove the Weil conjectures?
SGA 7
Illusie: No, but he had several irons in the re. In 19671968 and 19681969, there was another seminar, SGA 7,8 about monodromy, vanishing cycles, the R and R functors, cycle classes, Lefschetz pencils. Certainly he had already thought about the formalism of nearby cycles a few years before. Also, he had read Milnors book on singularities of hypersurfaces. Milnor had calculated some examples and observed that for these all the eigenvalues of the monodromy of the cohomology of what we now call the Milnor ber of an isolated singularity are roots of unity. Milnor conjectured that that was always the case, that the action was quasi-unipotent. Then Grothendieck said, What are the tools at our disposal? Hironakas resolution. But then you leave the world of isolated singularities, you can no longer take Milnor bers, you need a suitable global object. Then he realized that the complex of vanishing cycles that he had dened was what he wanted. Using resolution of singularities, he calculated, in the case of quasi-semistable reduction (with some multiplicities), the vanishing cycles, and then the solution came out quite easily in characteristic zero. He also obtained an arithmetic proof in the general case: he found this marvelous argument showing that when the residue eld of your local eld is not so big, in the sense that no nite extension of it contains all roots of unity of order a power of , then -adic representations are quasi-unipotent. He decided to make a seminar on that, and that was this magnicent seminar, SGA 7. Its in it that Deligne gave his beautiful exposs on the Picard-Lefschetz formula (at the request of Grothendieck, who couldnt understand
7
Berthelot is still more functorized than I am! Groupes de monodromie en gomtrie algbrique, Sminaire de Gomtrie Algbrique du Bois-Marie 19671969, I dirig par A. Grothendieck, II par P. Deligne et N. Katz, Lecture Notes in Math. 288, 340, Springer-Verlag 1972, 1973.
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p-divisible groups, in the continuation of his work on crystalline cohomology. His lectures on this (in 1966) had been written up by Coates and Jussila, and he let Berthelot develop a full-edged theory. One can regret he didnt give a seminar on abelian schemes. Im sure it would have produced a beautiful, unied presentation of the theory, much better than the scattered references we can nd in the literature. In 1970 he left the IHS and founded the ecological group Survivre (renamed later Survivre et Vivre). At the Nice congress, he was doing propaganda for it, oering documents taken out of a small cardboard suitcase. He was gradually considering mathematics as not being worthy of being studied, in view of the more urgent problems of the survival of the human species. He carelessly dispatched around him many of his documents (papers, private notes, etc.). Yet, in 19701971 he gave a beautiful course (together with a seminar) at the Collge de France on Barsotti-Tate groups and lectured later in Montreal on the same topic.
Grothendieck gave a series of lectures on motives at the IHS. One part was about the standard conjectures. He asked John Coates to write down notes. Coates did it, but the same thing happened: they were returned to him with many corrections. Coates was discouraged and quit. Eventually, it was Kleiman who wrote down the notes in Dix exposs sur la cohomologie des schmas.11 Drinfeld: But its not so good for many people, giving a thesis on coherent morphisms of toposes; its bad for most students. Illusie: I think these were good topics for Grothendieck himself. Drinfeld: Yes, sure. Illusie: But not for students. Similarly with Monique Hakim, Relative schemes over toposes. I am afraid this book12 was not such a success. Unknown: But the logicians like it very much. Illusie: I heard from Deligne that there were problems in some parts.13 Anyway, she was not so happy with this topic, and she did quite dierent mathematics afterward. I think that Raynaud also didnt like the topic that Grothendieck had given him. But he found another one by himself.14 That impressed Grothendieck, as well as the fact that Raynaud was able to understand Nrons construction of Nron models. Grothendieck of course had quite brilliantly used the universal property of Nron models in his exposs in SGA 7, but he could not grasp Nrons construction.
Verdier
For Verdier its a dierent story. I remember Grothendieck had a great admiration for Verdier. He admired what we now call the Lefschetz-Verdier trace formula and Verdiers idea of dening f ! rst as a formal adjoint, and then calculating it later. Bloch: I thought, maybe, that was Delignes idea. Illusie: No, it was Verdiers. But Deligne in the context of coherent sheaves used this idea afterward. Deligne was happy to somehow kill three hundred pages of Hartshornes seminar in eighteen pages. (laughter) Drinfeld: Which pages do you mean?
11
S. Kleiman, Algebraic cycles and the Weil conjectures, in Dix exposs sur la cohomologie des schmas, A. Grothendieck and N. Kuiper, eds., North Holland Pub. Co., Masson et Co., 1968, 359-386. 12 M. Hakim, Topos annels et schmas relatifs, Ergebnisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grentzgebiete, Bd 64, SpringerVerlag, 1972. 13 Added in April 2010: Deligne doesnt think there was anything wrong but remembers that the objects she dened over analytic spaces were not the desired ones. 14 M. Raynaud, Faisceaux amples sur les schmas en groupes et les espaces homognes, Lecture Notes in Math. 119, Springer-Verlag, 1970.
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Illusie: In the appendix to Hartshornes seminar Residues and Duality,15 I say Hartshornes seminar, but in fact it was Grothendiecks seminar. Pre-notes had been written up by Grothendieck. Hartshorne gave the seminar from these. Coming back to Verdier, who had written such a nice fascicule de rsultats on triangulated and derived categories,16 one can ask why he did not embark on writing a full account. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Verdier got interested in other things, analytic geometry, dierential equations, etc. When Verdier died in 1989, I gave a talk on his work, at a celebration for him in his memory, and I had to understand this issue: Why didnt he publish his thesis? He had written some summary, but not a full text. Probably one of the main reasons is simply that in the redaction of his manuscript he had not yet treated derived functors. He had discussed triangulated categories, the formalism of derived categories, the formalism of localization, but not yet derived functors.17 At the time he was already too busy with other things. And presumably he did not want to publish a book on derived categories without derived functors. Its certainly a pity.18 Drinfeld: And the Astrisque volume, how much does it correspond to? Illusie: It corresponds to what Verdier had written, up to derived functors.19 This volume is quite useful, I think, but for derived functors, you have to look at other places.20
Illusie: Quillen found that dierential graded algebras would give you a similar but in general inequivalent category to the derived category dened by simplicial algebras, but this was done in the late 1960s or early 1970s and did not appear in discussions with Grothendieck. However, I know the story about the ltered derived category. Grothendieck thought that if you have an endomorphism of a triangle of perfect complexes, then the trace of the middle part should be the sum of the traces of the right-hand side and the left-hand side. In SGA 5, when he discussed traces, he explained that on the board. One of the persons attending the seminar was Daniel Ferrand. At the time, nobody saw any problem with that, it was so natural. But then Grothendieck gave Ferrand the task of writing the construction of the determinant of a perfect complex. This is a higher invariant than the trace. Ferrand was stuck at one point. When he looked at the weaker version, he realized that he could not show that the trace of the middle part was the sum of the two extremes, and then he built a simple counterexample. The problem was: How can we reLuc Illusie store that? The person who at the time could repair anything that went wrong was Deligne. So, we asked Deligne. Deligne came up with the construction of a category of true triangles, ner than usual triangles, obtained by a certain process of localization, from pairs of a complex and a subcomplex. In my thesis I wanted to dene Chern classes, using an Atiyah extension. I needed some additivity of Chern classes, hence additivity of traces, and algebraic complements; I also needed tensor products, which increase lengths of ltrations. So I thought: why not just take ltered objects and localize with respect to maps inducing quasi-isomorphisms on the associated graded objects? It was very natural. So I wrote it up in my thesis, and everybody was happy. At the time, only nite ltrations were considered. Drinfeld: So it is written in your Springer Lecture Notes volumes on cotangent complex and deformations? Illusie: Yes, in SLN 239, Chapter V. Delignes category of true triangles was just DF [0,1] , the ltered derived category with ltrations of length 1. That was the beginning of the theory. However, Grothendieck said, In triangulated categories we have the octahedron axiom, what will replace that in ltered derived categories? Maybe the situation is not yet fully understood today. Once, Grothendieck told me, it must have been in 1969: We have the K -groups dened by vector bundles, but we could take vector bundles with a ltration of
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length one (with quotient a vector bundle), vector bundles with ltrations of length 2, length n, with associated graded still vector bundles. Then you have operations such as forgetting a step of the ltration, or taking a quotient by one step. This way you get some simplicial structure which should deserve to be studied and could yield interesting homotopy invariants. Independently, Quillen had worked out the Qconstruction, which is a substitute for the ltration approach. But, I think, if Grothendieck had had more time to think about it, he would have dened the higher K -groups. Drinfeld: But this approach looks more like Waldhausens one. Illusie: Yes, of course. Drinfeld: Which appeared much later. Illusie: Yes.
Cartier, Quillen
Drinfeld: During the SGA 6 seminar, was it known that the -operations have something to do with Witt rings? Illusie: Yes. In fact, I think that G. M. Bergmans appendix to Mumfords book on surfaces21 was already available at that moment. Drinfeld: Are there -operations in this appendix? Illusie: No, but I gave a talk in Bures on universal Witt rings and lambda operations. I remember I was going to the Arbeitstagung in Bonn. Having missed the night train I took an early morning train. Surprise: Serre and I were in the same compartment. I told him about the talk I had to prepare, and he generously helped me. During the whole trip, he improvised in a brilliant way, explaining to me several beautiful formulas, involving the Artin-Hasse exponential and other miracles of Witt vectors. This was discussed toward the end of the SGA 6 seminar, in June 1967. I wonder, Cartiers theory should have existed at the time. Tapis de Cartier, I think, existed. Drinfeld: What is Tapis de Cartier ? Illusie: Tapis de Cartier was how Grothendieck called Cartiers theory of formal groups. Tapis (= rug) was a (slightly derogatory) expression used by some Bourbaki members, comparing those who advocated for a theory to rug merchants. Bloch: But still, if you look back, Cartier made a lot of contributions. Illusie: Yes, Cartiers theory is powerful and had a strong impact later. But I dont think that Grothendieck used much of it. On the other hand, at the time, Grothendieck was impressed by Quillen, who had brilliant new ideas on many topics. About the cotangent complex, I dont remember well now,
21
but Quillen had a way of calculating the Exti of the cotangent complex and O as the cohomology of the structural sheaf of a certain site, which looked like the crystalline site, but with the arrows reversed. That surprised Grothendieck. Unknown: Apparently, this idea was rediscovered later by Gaitsgory.22 Bloch: In Quillens notes on the cotangent complex it was the rst time Id ever seen a derived tensor product over a derived tensor product. Illusie: Yes, in the relation between the (derived) self-intersection complex and the cotangent complex. Bloch: I think it was something like B L B. I B L AB remember studying for days, puzzling over exactly what that meant. Illusie: But when I said I couldnt do my Knneth formula, one reason was that such an object didnt exist at the time. Drinfeld: I am afraid that even now it doesnt exist in the literature (although it may exist in somebodys head). I needed the derived tensor product of algebras over a ring a few years ago when I worked on the article on DG categories. I was unable either to nd this notion in the literature or to dene it neatly. So I had to write something pretty ugly.
Grothendiecks Tastes
Illusie: I realize I didnt say much about Grothendiecks tastes. For example, do you know the piece of music he would like most? Bloch: Did he like music at all? Illusie: Grothendieck had a very strong feeling for music. He liked Bach, and his most beloved pieces were the last quartets by Beethoven. Also, do you know what his favorite tree was? He liked nature, and there was one tree he liked more than the others. It was the olive tree, a modest tree, but which lives long, is very sturdy, is full of sun and life. He was very fond of the olive tree. In fact, he always liked the south very much, long before he went to Montpellier. He had been a member of the Bourbaki group, and he had visited La Messuguire, where some congresses were held. He tried to get me to go to that place, but it didnt work out. It is a beautiful estate on the heights above Cannes. You have Grasse a little higher, and still a little higher you have a small village called Cabris, where there is this estate, with eucalyptus trees, olive trees, pine trees, and a magnicent view. He liked it very much. He had a fancy for this sort of landscape. Drinfeld: Do you know what Grothendiecks favorite books were? You mentioned his favorite music
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D. Mumford, Lectures on curves on an algebraic surface. With a section by G. M. Bergman. Annals of Mathematics Studies, No. 59, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. 1966.
D. Gaitsgory, Grothendieck topologies and deformation theory II. Compositio Math. 106 (1997), no. 3, 321348.
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Illusie: I dont remember. I think he didnt read much. There are only twenty-four hours in a day
There are also three exposs on the Brauer group which are important and useful, but seven exposs on motives would have been even more interesting. However, I dont think they would have contained things which have not been worked out by now.
Grothendiecks Style
Illusie: Yes, but Im not so fond of Weils style. Grothendiecks style had some defects also. One that was barely perceptible at the beginning and became enormous later is his habit of afterthoughts and footnotes. Rcoltes et Semailles is incredible in this respect. So many, so long footnotes! Already in his beautiful letter to Atiyah on de Rham cohomology there are many footnotes, which contain some of the most important things. Bloch: Oh, I remember seeing photocopies, early photocopies, when photocopy machines didnt work all that well. He would type a letter and then add handwritten comments which were illegible. Illusie: Well, I was used to his handwriting, so I could understand. Bloch: We would sit around and puzzle Illusie: To him no statement was ever the best one. He could always nd something better, more general or more exible. Working on a problem, he said he had to sleep with it for some time. He liked mechanisms that had oil in them. For this you had to do scales, exercises (like a pianist), consider special cases, functoriality. At the end you obtained a formalism amenable to dvissage.
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Motives
Illusie: I regret that he was not allowed to speak on motives at the Bourbaki seminar. He asked for six or seven exposs, and the organizers considered it was too much. Bloch: It was kind of unique then; nobody else was lecturing on their own work. Illusie: Yes, but you see, FGA (Fondements de la Gomtrie Algbrique) consists of several exposs. He was thinking of doing for motives what he had done for the Picard scheme, the Hilbert scheme, etc.
A. Weil, ber die Bestimmung Dirichletscher Reihen durch Funktionalgleichungen, Math. Ann. 168 (1967), 149156. 24 A. Weil, Introduction ltude des varits khlriennes. Publications de lInstitut de Mathmatique de lUniversit de Nancago, VI. Actualits Sci. Ind. no. 1267, Hermann, Paris, 1958.
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I think one reason why Grothendieck, after Serres talk at the Chevalley seminar in 1958, was condent that tale localization would give the correct H i s is that once you had the correct cohomology of curves, then by bration in curves and dvissage you should also reach the higher H i s. I think he was the rst one to write a map vertically instead of from left to right.25 Drinfeld: It was he who put the X over S . Before that X was on the left and S was on the right. Illusie: Yes. He was thinking over a base. The base could be a scheme, a topos, anything. The base had no special properties. Its the relative situation that was important. Thats why he wanted to get rid of Noetherian assumptions. Bloch: And I remember, in the early days schemes, morphisms were separated, but then they became quasi-separated.
the proof of the relative version, GrothendieckRiemann-Roch, is so easy, with the problem shifted to the case of an immersion. This was fantastic.26 Grothendieck was the father of K -theory, certainly. But it was Serres idea to look at . I think the people in the olden days, they had no idea of the right generalization of Riemann-Roch for curves. For surfaces, both sides of the formula were quite intricate. Its Serre who realized that the Euler-Poincar characteristic, the alternate sum of the dimensions of the H i (O) or the H i (E) was the invariant you should look for. That was in the early 1950s. And then Grothendieck saw that the universal was in the K -group
Commutative Algebra
Illusie: At the time of Weil, you looked at elds, and then valuations, and then valuation rings, and normal rings. Rings were usually supposed to be normal. Grothendieck thought it was ridiculous to make such systematic restrictions from the beginning. When dening Spec A, A should be any commutative ring. Drinfeld: Sorry, but how did people treat the nodal curve if the rings were supposed to be normal? Non-normal varieties appear Illusie: Of course, but they often looked at the normalization. Grothendieck was aware of the importance of normality, and I think Serres criterion of normality was one of the motivations for his theory of depth and local cohomology. Bloch: I wonder whether today such a style of mathematics could exist. Illusie: Voevodskys work is fairly general. Several people tried to imitate Grothendieck, but Im afraid that what they did never reached that oily character dear to Grothendieck. But it is not to say that Grothendieck was not happy to study objects having rich structures. As for EGA IV, it is of course a masterpiece of local algebra, a domain in which he was extremely strong. We owe a lot to EGA IV, though maybe some rewriting could be possible now, using the cotangent complex.
Relative Statements
Illusie: Certainly were now so used to putting some problem into relative form that we forget how revolutionary it was at the time. Hirzebruchs proof of Riemann-Roch is very complicated, while
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Added in April 2010: Cartier observes that vertical lines had been commonly used to denote eld extensions since long ago, especially in the German school.
Added in April 2010: as Deligne observes, equally revolutionaryand intimately linked to the relative viewpointwas Grothendiecks idea of thinking of a scheme in terms of the functor it represents, thus recovering a geometric language somewhat concealed in the ringed spaces approach.
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should go to the CNRS. Once at the CNRS, you were there for the rest of your life. Which is not quite true. A position at the CNRS at that time was not one of fonctionnaire (civil servant). But as I was not idle, my contract was renewed from year to year. Of course, we were maybe fteen people at the cole Normale doing mathematics, and there were not that many positions at the CNRS. Others could get positions as assistants, which were not so good as the CNRS, but still reasonable. Drinfeld: And did somebody tell you from time to time that it is time to nish your thesis? Illusie: Well, after seven years, it could become a problem. As I had started at the CNRS in 1963, and had nished my thesis by 1970, I was safe. Drinfeld: And the fact that you spent seven years didnt diminish your chances for future employment? Illusie: No. From 1963 to 1969 I was attach de recherche, then, from 1969 to 1973, charg de recherche, and promoted matre de recherche in 1973 (the equivalent of directeur de deuxime classe today). Nowadays if a student after ve years has not defended his thesis, its a problem. Drinfeld: What has changed? Illusie: The thse dtat was suppressed, replaced by the standard thesis, following the American model. Drinfeld: I see. Illusie: Typically, a student has three years to nish his thesis. After three years, the fellowship ends, and he has to nd a position somewhere, either a permanent one or a temporary one (like ATER = attach denseignement et de recherche, or a postdoc). For a few years we had a transitional system with the nouvelle thse (new thesis), similar to the thesis we have now, followed by the thse dtat. Now the thse dtat is replaced by the habilitation. Its not the same kind of thing. Its a set of papers that you present at the defense. You need the habilitation for applying for a position of professor.
EGA
Bloch: You cant tell a student now to go to EGA and learn algebraic geometry Illusie: Actually, students want to read EGA. They understand that for specic questions they have to go to this place, the only place where they can nd a satisfactory answer. You have to give them the key to enter there, explain to them the basic language. And then they usually prefer EGA to other expository books. Of course, EGA or SGA are more like dictionaries than books you could read from A to Z. Bloch: One thing that always drove me crazy about EGA was the excessive back referencing. I mean there would be a sentence and then a seven-digit number Illusie: No Youre exaggerating. Bloch: You never knew whether behind the veiled curtain was something very interesting that you should search back in a dierent volume to nd; or whether in fact it was just referring to something that was completely obvious and you didnt need to Illusie: That was one principle of Grothendieck: every assertion should be justied, either by a reference or by a proof. Even a trivial one. He hated such phrases as Its easy to see, Its easily checked. When he was writing EGA, you see, he was in unknown territory. Though he had a clear general picture, it was easy to go astray. Thats partly why he wanted a justication for everything. He also wanted Dieudonn to be able to understand! Drinfeld: What was Dieudonns contribution to the EGA? Illusie: He did rewriting, lling in details, adding complements, polishing the proofs. But Grothendiecks rst drafts (tat 000 ), some of which I have seen, were already quite elaborate. Nowadays you have such ecient TEX systems, manuscripts look very nice. In Grothendiecks time the presentation was not so beautiful, maybe, but Dieudonn-Grothendiecks manuscripts were still fantastic. I think Dieudonns most important contribution was on the part of EGA IV dealing with dierential calculus in positive characteristic, with complete local rings, which is basic in the theory of excellent rings. Also, Grothendieck was not thrifty. He thought that some complements, even if they were not immediately useful, could prove important later and therefore should not be removed. He wanted to see all the facets of a theory. Unknown: When Grothendieck started working on EGA, did he already have a vision of what would come later, tale cohomology Did he have in mind some applications? Illusie: The plan he gives for EGA in the rst edition of EGA I (in 1960) amply shows the vision he had at that time.
Grothendieck Today
Unknown: Maybe you told me, but where is Grothendieck now? Nobody knows? Illusie: Maybe some people know. I myself dont know. Bloch: If we were to go to Google and type in Grothendieck Illusie: Wed nd the Grothendieck site. Bloch: Yes, the website. He has a web topos 27 Unknown: What happened to his son? Did he become a mathematician? Illusie: He has four sons. I heard the last one studied at Harvard.
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Grothendieck Circle.
October 2010
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