Alexander was born in 1928. Son of Alexander "Sascha" Schapiro (also known as Alexander Tanaroff), and Johanna "Hanka" Grothendieck, At the time of his birth, Grothendieck's mother was married to the journalist Johannes Raddatz and his birthname was initially recorded as "Alexander Raddatz." The marriage was dissolved in 1929 and Schapiro/Tanaroff acknowledged his paternity, but never married Hanka.
He had five children: a son with his landlady during his time in Nancy, three children, Johanna (1959), Alexander (1961) and Mathieu (1965) with his wife Mireille Dufour, and one child with Justine Skalba, with whom he lived in a commune in the early 1970s.
Alexandre Grothendieck is one of the great mathematicians to be known from the 20th century. After doing some work in Algebraic Geometry, Grothendieck joined the Institut des Etudes (IHES) in 1958 and worked there for twelve years. He dedicatedly worked with various mathematicians and brought forward many new concepts in algebraic geometry. Commutative algebra, homological algebra, sheaf theory, category theory, and theory of schemes etc. were some of the topics he extensively worked on and used them for various applications and in solving difficult problems. This allowed future scientists and mathematicians to come up with new researches by applying his theories. For instance, Gerd Faltings worked on the Mordell conjecture and Andrew Wiles worked on the Fermat’s last theorem. His generalization of the classical Riemann-Roch theorem related topological properties of complex algebraic curves to their algebraic structure. The tools he developed to prove this theorem started the study of algebraic and topological K-theory, which study the topological properties of objects by associating them with rings. Topological K-theory was founded by Michael Atiyah and Friedrich Hirzebruch, after direct contact with Grothendieck's ideas at the Bonn Arbeitstagung. In 1966, he also received the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians which was held in Moscow.
He passed away in 2014.
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