Grothendiecks invändning

Enter Bas Edixhoven,\na Dutch mathematics professor who conceived the rather marvelous idea\nof organizing teams of volunteers to re-type all of SGA using modern\ntypesetting software, correcting typos and inserting references to more\nrecent literature where appropriate. Edixhoven secured the blessings of\nall of Grothendieck's collaborators, but was unable to contact the\ngreat man himself, who has spent most of the past two decades in\ncomplete seclusion in an unknown location.

But in the many years since Grothendieck retired from mathematics and\nwithdrew from society, he has periodically (though not for several\nyears now) released long, eccentric and beautiful manuscripts\ncontaining thousands of pages of mathematics, autobigraphy, philosophy\nand theology, and these give some clues. (...)

The thrust of his objection--and I am a little hesitant to summarize the\nsubtleties of his position in a single phrase, but here goes--is that\neveryone's picking the fruit and nobody's tending the garden. Nobody,\nthat is, is doing the sort of deep foundational work that marked\nGrothendieck's own career. That ongoing disappointment, presumably, has\nsomething to do with the letter that arrived last month.