Alexander Grothendieck

Grothendieck's public mathematical life began in 1949, and by 1958 he had landed at the Institut des hautes études scientifiques, where he spent twelve years dismantling and rebuilding algebraic geometry with tools from commutative algebra, homological algebra, sheaf theory, and category theory. The Fields Medal came in 1966 for that work and his advances in K-theory. In 1970, a dispute over military funding drove him out of IHÉS; he took a professorship at the University of Montpellier but increasingly turned from mathematics to political activism, Buddhism, and later a Catholic Christian outlook. In 1991 he withdrew to Lasserre, a village in the Pyrenees, and lived there alone until his death in 2014, still working on mathematics and philosophy in seclusion.