Jean Pierre Serre

Trees

Alexandre Grothendieck

Pierre Colmez

The book is a bilingual (French and English) edition of the mathematical correspondence between A. Grothendieck and J-P. Serre. The original French text of 84 letters is supplemented here by the English translation, with French text printed on the left-hand pages and the corresponding English text printed on the right-hand pages. The book also includes several facsimiles of original letters. The letters presented in the book were mainly written between 1955 and 1965. During this period, algebraic geometry went through a remarkable transformation, and Grothendieck and Serre were among central figures in this process. The reader can follow the creation of some of the most important notions of modern mathematics, like sheaf cohomology, schemes, Riemann-Roch type theorems, algebraic fundamental group, motives. The letters also reflect the mathematical and political atmosphere of this period (Bourbaki, Paris, Harvard, Princeton, war in Algeria, etc.). Also included are a few letters written between 1984 and 1987. The letters are supplemented by J-P. Serre's notes, which give explanations, corrections, and references further results. The book should be useful to specialists in algebraic geometry, in history of mathematics, and to all mathematicians who want to understand how great mathematics is created.

Grothendieck-Serre Correspondence

Uwe Jannsen

Steven Kleiman

Motives were introduced in the mid-1960s by Grothendieck to explain the analogies among the various cohomology theories for algebraic varieties, to play the role of the missing rational cohomology, and to provide a blueprint for proving Weil's conjectures about the zeta function of a variety over a finite field. Over the last ten years or so, researchers in various areas--Hodge theory, algebraic $K$-theory, polylogarithms, automorphic forms, $L$-functions, $\ell$-adic representations, trigonometric sums, and algebraic cycles--have discovered that an enlarged (and in part conjectural) theory of ``mixed'' motives indicates and explains phenomena appearing in each area. Thus the theory holds the potential of enriching and unifying these areas. This is the second of two volumes containing the revised texts of nearly all the lectures presented at the AMS-IMS-SIAM Joint Summer Research Conference on Motives, held in Seattle, in 1991. A number of related works are also included, making for a total of forty-seven papers, from general introductions to specialized surveys to research papers.

Jean Pierre Serre

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