From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/6641 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: William Messing Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Re: Explanations Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2011 08:45:33 -0500 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: William Messing NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1303861961 11753 80.91.229.12 (26 Apr 2011 23:52:41 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2011 23:52:41 +0000 (UTC) To: categories@mta.ca Original-X-From: majordomo@mlist.mta.ca Wed Apr 27 01:52:36 2011 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from smtpx.mta.ca ([138.73.1.4]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1QEs3Y-00069m-Kz for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Wed, 27 Apr 2011 01:52:36 +0200 Original-Received: from mlist.mta.ca ([138.73.1.63]:58645) by smtpx.mta.ca with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1QEs1S-00014X-Gr; Tue, 26 Apr 2011 20:50:26 -0300 Original-Received: from majordomo by mlist.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1QEs1P-0006g8-RR for categories-list@mlist.mta.ca; Tue, 26 Apr 2011 20:50:23 -0300 In-Reply-To: Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:6641 Archived-At: I agree with what Andre wrote concerning proofs. Ronnie, you will certainly recall Grothendieck's letter to you in which he recalled that at the first Seminaire Cartan he was initially quite perplexed as to how the singular chain complex of a topological space, gigantic in size, could possibly lead to concrete computations and applications. As he said, he soon realized that it is not the size that matters, but understanding things properly, that is, in the correct order or manner. In the same letter he recalled that initially he was mystified as to how one would ever be able to make concrete calculations in etale cohomology, until, after, as he1 put it, several days of intense thought, he saw that understanding the cohomology of curves, with perhaps arbitrary constuctible torsion sheaves (torsion prime to the characteristic of the field over which one is working) was the key. Concerning proofs constructed by people as opposed to computer assisted proofs, many years ago Deligne remarked that while he did not believe in computer assisted proofs, he was not going to look for a counterexample to the proof of the four color theorem. Best regards, Bill Messing [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]