Rivka Galchen’s New Yorker essay on the famous mathematical genius and dropout Alexander Grothendieck (May 9, 2022; archived) is absolutely fascinating and makes me wish I could retrieve my math-major mind of a half-century back so I could understand more about his contributions. But what makes me bring it here is this sentence:
Grothendieck’s discoveries opened up mathematics in a way that was analogous to how Wittgenstein (and Saussure) changed our views of language.
I just... I mean, it’s like writing “how Bergson (and Einstein) changed our views of physics.” For certain values of “our” it may make sense, but those values do not include actual mathematicians and physicists. It continually astonishes me how vanishingly small is the amount people who have not studied linguistics know about language and the science that deals with it.