Looking back at the Panel Discussion with Marie Durrieu, Hervé Le Tellier and Abel Quentin

IHES was founded in 1958 by French entrepreneur of Russian origin Léon Motchane. His vision was to offer mathematicians and theoretical physicists a place where they could exchange ideas—just as chemists or biologists have laboratories—a place where they could break free from the isolation often associated with their disciplines.

Alexandre Grothendieck, widely considered the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, was, alongside Jean Dieudonné, one of the first Permanent Professors at IHES. Together, they led the famous Séminaire de Géométrie Algébrique, through which Grothendieck rebuilt the foundations of algebraic geometry. These new foundations later led to the proof of the Weil conjectures by his student Pierre Deligne, and, a few decades later, to Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Grothendieck left IHES after discovering the existence of a grant from the French Ministry of Defense. He increasingly turned his attention to political and environmental activism, notably through the Survivre et vivre movement, which he founded in 1970 with fellow mathematicians Claude Chevalley and Pierre Samuel. Grothendieck passed away on November 13, 2014, in the south of France, where he had withdrawn from public life in the late 1980s. He left behind a colossal written legacy of over 27,000 pages, spanning mathematics, ecology, psychoanalysis, spirituality, and religion. Since his death, parts of his work have been published, including his autobiography Récoltes et semailles, published by Gallimard in 2022 and forthcoming in translation from MIT Press.

To mark the 10th anniversary of his passing, IHES hosted a special literary evening on February 6 at the Marilyn and James Simons Conference Center. Guests included Marie Durrieu, producer of the Grande Traversée podcast on Alexandre Grothendieck for the French radio channel France Culture; Hervé Le Tellier, winner of the 2020 Goncourt Prize for The Anomaly; and Abel Quentin, author of Cabane. Together, they explored how science and scientists inspire contemporary literature.

Why does Grothendieck—and scientists more broadly—captivate the attention of writers today? How do their lives and work shape fiction? These questions guided a rich and engaging discussion, punctuated by the screening of archival footage showing Grothendieck protesting the construction of nuclear power plants in the French town of Le Bugey, and by readings from the authors’ novels, where mathematics—and Grothendieck himself—appear within the narrative.

In The Anomaly, both Grothendieck and Misha Gromov—also a Permanent Professor of Mathematics at IHES—are mentioned by a character who is a mathematician attempting to untangle a mystery inspired by Nick Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis. In Cabane, Abel Quentin explores how scientists grapple with the societal implications of their discoveries. Like Grothendieck, the novel’s main character—a mathematician and co-author of The Limits of Growth—eventually turns away from science in search of meaning amid a looming ecological collapse.

Responding to the archival footage, Hervé Le Tellier—a mathematician by training and a member of Oulipo, the French literary group known for exploring formal constraints in writing—recalled a brief encounter with Grothendieck in the 1970s during a Survivre et vivre meeting. Since then, Grothendieck has remained a source of fascination for Le Tellier and features in several of his books.

Abel Quentin, a lawyer by profession with no formal scientific background, spoke of his admiration for the ethical rigor and intellectual independence embodied by scientists like Grothendieck—figures of silent rebellion and moral intransigence—traits he also instilled in the protagonist of his novel.

The authors also addressed the challenge of incorporating mathematics into fiction. Hervé Le Tellier explained that, although he is a former science journalist and mathematician, he avoids science popularization in his novels. Instead, he draws inspiration from figures such as Paul Erdős and Stanislaw Ulam, using mathematicians as characters to explore the world of abstract thought. Abel Quentin, meanwhile, emphasized that scientific ideas can structure a story even without being directly mentioned. In Cabane, concepts like the golden ratio, Fibonacci sequence, or René Thom’s catastrophe theory, mirror the psychological development of the characters.

Finally, the discussion turned to how literature can capture the subjectivity of research. While scientific writing tends to abstract away the individuality of its authors, literature allows for the humanization of scientists, giving voice to their doubts and dilemmas—both in their research and their personal lives. Abel Quentin recalled one of Grothendieck’s most essential messages: that science is never neutral, and that its applications must thus be critically examined.

The evening concluded with a lively Q&A session with the audience, followed by a cocktail reception. The event highlighted the public’s genuine interest in the dialogue between science and literature—and the enduring presence of Alexandre Grothendieck in society.