‘ And there is growing academic and corporate attention to how Grothendieckian concepts could be practically applied for technological ends. Chinese telecoms giant Huawei believes his esoteric concept of the topos could be key to building the next generation of AI, and has hired Fields medal-winner Laurent Lafforgue to explore this subject. But Grothendieck’s motivations were not worldly ones, as his former colleague Pierre Cartier understood. “Even in his mathematical milieu, he wasn’t quite a member of the family,” writes Cartier. “He pursued a kind of monologue, or rather a dialogue with mathematics and God, which to him were one and the same.”

Never heard of him before, RIP but this reads like the beginning of neal stephenson novel… interesting