In brief, lay terms, as I have heard it, there was this brilliant young French mathematician in the 1950s by the name of Alexandre Grothendieck who all but single-handedly revolutionized/created certain fields of Algebraic Geometry. Some 10-15 years later, he gave up academic life, moved to the Pyrrenées, and became a sheep farmer.

Since Grothendieck’s disengagement, his body of work has remained wildly useful and has formed a bedrock for later mathematical generations. The respect accorded to his own writings has gone so far as to inspire its own personal Distributed Proofreaders analogue for creating a TeX version of a long systematic work, “Séminaire de Géométrie Algébrique” (or SGA). The free electronic SGA project has been ongoing for the better part of a decade or more; volumes SGA 1 and SGA 2 are up on the arXiv already.

It seems just possible that might not be true much longer.

Behold the text of the until-recently-current webpage for the SGA 4 project:

Alexandre Grothendieck a malheureusement souhaité que cessent les travaux de réédition de SGA. Les pages qui étaient consacrées sont donc closes.
Dernière actualisation : 2 février 2010.

There is slightly more information, and much discussion, at Scott Morrison’s post on the Secret Blogging Seminar, a group math weblog. Again in brief (and English), Grothendieck apparently resurfaced enough to put out a letter stating that he doesn’t want his work republished or translated.

And he wags his finger at anyone who has done so or wants to.

Which is the really weird part. Assuming the letter is genuine, what legal ramifications does it actually have? Why use a phrase like “unlawful in my eyes,” which sounds to me deliberately obfuscatory? (Legality is not a matter of an individual’s vision.) The comments on the SBSeminar post seem weighted towards arguments as to the moral dimensions of Grothendieck’s stated wishes and a given mathematician’s obligation to respect them (or not). To me, the legal questions are more pressing and pertinent. Whether one has a moral obligation to respect an author’s wishes is a decision one makes for oneself. Whether the mathematical community as a whole has a legal obligation to take Grothendieck at his word has greater ramifications–and probably a single, findable answer (unlike a question of personal morality).

Edixhoven, one of the prior leaders of the TeX SGA project, did research the distribution question through the publishers and was told copyright had in fact reverted to the original authors (as he states on the linked page). This seems to indicate Grothendieck is not out of line to say he withholds his permission. But the questions only start there. …

Some on the SBSeminar comment thread made the “glass half full” suggestion that maybe it’s time SGA got a revamp anyhow. Yet the original is still a precious resource. I’ll be interested to try to follow what decisions are made.

Some of these are nifty enough that I wanted to share, especially since almost all mashups are available for free download. Check them out!

Clever Juxtapositions

“Monty Python’s Killer Queen”
Theme from Monty Python’s Flying Circus
vs.
Queen – “Killer Queen”

“If I Were a Free Fallin’ Boy”
Beyonce – “If I Were a Boy”
vs.
Tom Petty – “Free Fallin’”
I’d never heard the Beyonce song, either. It’s not important to “getting” or enjoying this mashup.

“Don’t Cha Want Me”
Pussycat Dolls – “Don’t Cha”
vs.
Human League – “Don’t You Want Me”

“From the Heart of Glass”
Blondie – “Heart of Glass”
vs.
Philip Glass – “Glassworks” (combination of Opening and Closing)

Wow, That’s Really Cool / How the Hell Does That Work?

“Never Gonna Give Your Teen Spirit Up”
Rick Astley – “Never Gonna Give You Up”
vs.
Nirvana – “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
video available here

“Black Butterfly Busters”
Ram Jam – “Black Betty”
vs.
Smashing Pumpkins – “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”
vs.
Ray Parker Jr. – “Ghostbusters”
The Pumpkins song is the “rat in a cage” one — you probably know it, if not its title.

“Mia Freaky Mamma (On a Leash)”
Korn – “Freak on a Leash”
vs.
Abba – “Mamma Mia”
This one, in particular, is hysterically funny.

Just Plain Awesome

“Hotel California Must Go On”
The Eagles – “Hotel California”
vs.
Queen – “The Show Must Go On”

“Toxic Starlight”
Britney Spears – “Toxic”
vs.
Supermen Lovers – “Starlight”
Give this one a try even — or even especially — if you can’t stand the Britney Spears original. The new background completely harmonically recontextualizes the song.

Pure, Jaw-Dropping Magnificence

“Fixicity”
System of a Down – “Toxicity”
vs.
Coldplay – “Fix You”
SoaD is a scream-into-the-microphone-while-playing-heavily-distorted-chords metal band. “Fix You” is one of Coldplay’s slower, more boring songs, and that’s saying something. The intersection between them is nothing short of epic, in all the senses of that word.

In the past I’ve mostly watched individual talks that others have pointed out to me, but today I took some time to explore the site and find things on my own. One of my discoveries was the “TED in 3 Minutes” series, which includes shorter talks. I particular liked “Arthur Benjamin’s formula for changing math education“. His idea, which I whole-heartedly agree with, is that high school math education should shift its focus away from calculus and onto statistics. Although calculus is integral (pun intended!) to higher math and sciences, most students will never need it. Probability theory, on the other hand, is immediately applicable to every student’s life. As we manage our finances or make medical decisions, it’s important for everyone to be able to intelligently assess risks and benefits.

To help spread all these ideas, the TEDTalks website has transcripts for all their videos. The transcripts allow the text of each talk to be searchable, and through the “interactive transcript” feature you can jump straight to the point in a video where given text appears. The “TED Open Translation Project” allows anyone to submit translations of these transcripts into other languages, to further spread these ideas beyond the English-speaking community.

With over 450 videos available, it’s difficult to know where to start watching TEDTalks. If you have a favorite talk or two, please let us know in the comments.

You can find out more about Jonathan Coulton on his website. I actually don’t know much apart from his most popular songs, but perhaps someone will enlighten us (with further song recommendations, for example) in the comments or with a follow-up blog post?

This is a most amazingly addictive game. You build machines. Machines! Simple machines that do things. Amazing things. All in service of getting an object to a target area. Once you’ve struggled your own way through the various levels (fun and frustrating at times), you can see some of the incredible things that others have created with simple tools. Eventually, you will realize that it is 4 in the morning and you should have gone to bed a long, long time ago.

Random cool thing from the Internets:

http://www.rawkins.com/games/do2/

It’s a very, very simple browser game.  Also very, very pretty, and very, very addictive.  I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who feels like he isn’t wasting enough time.  Also anyone who likes dolphins.

Gameplay hint (that it took me far too long to figure out): You can chain jumps together.  So long as you get a “Nice Entry” (and you get out of the water again in a reasonable amount of time), your next jump counts as part of your last jump, and you retain all the speed you’ve gathered.  Do this a few times and you can jump *high*.