Notes of French mathematician Grothendieck published online

CAIRO - 27 May 2017: Nearly 18,000 pages of hand-written notes by the French mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck have been published online and are available for free on https://grothendieck.umontpellier.fr/.

It is hoped that this huge step to make the notes public taken by Montpellier University in France, Grothendieck's alma mater, will help pave the way to important future discoveries.

Grothendieck, a prominent figure in modern algebraic geometry, was born in Berlin in 1928 to a Ukrainian father and a German mother before moving to France in 1939 in order to study. He died in 2014 at the age of 86.

"Alexandre Grothendieck revolutionized an entire area of mathematics, algebraic geometry," said Jean-Michel Marin, the head of the institute named after the mathematician at Montpellier University. "It will take years of work by experts to benefit from his notes," Marin told AFP.