When Grothendieck was still an undergraduate student at the University of Montpellier, his professor, Laurent Schwartz, gave him an article he had published not long before which included fourteen major unresolved problems, and asked Grothendieck to choose one of them for his thesis. The young man, who was always bored and distracted in his classes and seemed incapable of following instructions, returned three months later. Schwartz asked him which problem he had chosen and how far along he had got. Grothendieck looked at him, baffled. What did he mean by “which one”? He had solved all of
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