"Mazur suggests that it’s possible to glimpse the essence of Grothendieck’s approach to mathematics by looking at two concepts—categories and functors. A category can be thought of almost as a grammar: take triangles, perhaps, and understand them in terms of their relationship to all other triangles. The category consists of objects, and relationships between objects. The objects are nouns and the relationships are verbs, and the category is all the ways in which they can interact. Grothendieck’s discoveries opened up mathematics in a way that was analogous to how Wittgenstein (and Saussure) changed our views of language."
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Jews from the United StatesPeople from New York CityMathematicians from the United StatesNational Medal of Science laureatesPrinceton University alumni
Original Language: English
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Rivka Galchen,
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Barry_Mazur
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Barry Mazur
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