Grothendieck, Flaubert and the search for the perfect word.
Thus are we constantly led to “invent” the language best suited to ever more finely express the intimate structure of mathematical things — Alexander Grothendieck
If I put 'blue' after 'stones,' it's because 'blue' is le mot juste, believe me — Gustave Flaubert
Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tonnes. It is bound for Le Havre. The mainmast is broken, the cabin boy is on the deck, there are 12 passengers aboard, the wind is blowing east-north-east, the clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How old is the Captain?
— Gustave Flaubert, 1841, letter to his sister. The origin of this quote to me is equally funny: Euclidean Geometry in Mathematical Olympiads, Evan Chen.
LE MOT JUSTE
(this piece is incomplete!)
So here is Gustave Flaubert, famous for obsessing over the perfect word. One can imagine the stress of translating Madame Bovary to English. Lydia Davis did it. She won a prize for her translation too.
In rewriting, he would watch out for poor assonances, bad repetitions of sounds and of words (especially qui and que, which he occasionally underlined and apologized for even in his letters) — Zola remarks that “often a single letter exasperated him.” (Davis 2010)
What to say of Alexander Grothendieck, mathematician?
There is no need to introduce Alexander Grothendieck to mathematicians: he is one of the great scientists of the twentieth century. (Cartier 2014)
From here I will bounce between Flaubert and Grothendieck using words from their own writings
Unfortunately, the role played by projective spaces in all this still seems rather excessive. I feel like looking into whether one doesn’t get something for “regular arithmetic varieties” which are “complete” (i.e. obtained by gluing together spectra of regular rings). But to start with, do you have any idea of what complete really means in this context? (Grothendieck)
My winter is to pass in complete solitude, good way of making life run along rapidly. (Flaubert)
Cartier, Pierre. A Country Known Only by Name. https://inference-review.com/article/a-country-known-only-by-name
McKenzie, Aimee L. The George Sand Gustave Flaubert Letters. London: Duckworth & Co. (1922) https://ia601603.us.archive.org/29/items/georgesandgustav00sandiala/georgesandgustav00sandiala.pdf
Grothendiek, Alexander. Récoltes et Semailles. Note: The 1900-page R&S has not been fully translated to English, but Saad Slaoui, a PhD student at UT Austin, is knee-deep (202 pages) into one. See here: https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/slaoui/notes/recoltes_et_semailles.pdf
Pater, Walter. Style. Aesthetic Criticism and Polemic. (1889) https://aestheticperceptioncognition.se/pdf/pater-on-style.pdf