"The question you raise “how can such a formulation lead to computations” doesn’t bother me in the least! Throughout my whole life as a mathematician, the possibility of making explicit, elegant computations has always come out by itself, as a byproduct of a thorough conceptual understanding of what was going on. Thus I never bothered about whether what would come out would be suitable for this or that, but just tried to understand – and it always turned out that understanding was all that mattered."

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Added on April 10, 2026
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Original Language: English

Sources

Letter to Ronald Brown, 12 April, 1983

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck