Unpublished Mathematical Texts

Eighteen thousand pages of Grothendieck's personal mathematical writings, left behind when he abandoned Les Aumettes for Lasserre in 1991, were scanned by the University of Montpellier and are available online.

Esquisse Thématique - an overview that Grothendieck wrote of his own work, with an English version (courtesy of G. Aiello).

En Guise de Programme, Page 1 and Page 2 - a text written by Grothendieck as a course description while teaching in Montpellier.

• Espaces Vectoriels Topologiques  - These are the origial French course notes from Grothendieck's series of lectures in São Paulo in 1954, scan provided courtesy of Jean-Pierre Vial.
• A General Theory of Fibre Spaces with Structure Sheaf  - This early paper, written while Grothendieck was at the University of Kansas on an NSF grant in 1955, was only published as an NSF research report. There is a French translation of the first two chapters.
• Motifs - Apart from some letters to Serre and others, this preliminary text dating from 1965-1970 and handwritten (typed up by later readers) is the only mathematical text that Grothendieck can be said to have written on the subject of motives, outside of some letters to Serre (Grothendieck-Serre Correspondence).
• Tannakian notes - A 25-page text (undated -- 1960's?) from J. Milne's files, on Tannakian categories over a field and the toolbox of liens, gerbes etc. It contains a discussion of applications to isocrystals and Dieudonné-Manin theory.
• Notes of Grothendieck's last lecture at the IHES in 1975, typed up in 2003.
• La Longue Marche à travers la théorie de Galois, Contents - Table of contents. This manuscript, consisting of some nearly 800 hand-written double pages, dating from 1981, was left behind with Grothendieck's other unpublished manuscripts when he disappeared in 1991. Typed in Tex, it comes out to about 400 pages. It goes together with a further 1000 pages or so of additional notes and sections which have not yet been read or typed. Many of the major themes were summarised in the 1983 manuscript Esquisse d'un Programme linked below.
• La Longue Marche, Part Ia - La longue Marche à travers la théorie de Galois, (sections 1-25)- Not yet available.
• La Longue Marche, Part Ib - La longue Marche à travers la théorie de Galois, (sections 26-37, 110 typed pages)
• La Longue Marche, Part II - Part II of the Longue Marche (sections 38-53) has not yet been typed yet, except for the very long section 49 (129 typed pages). Section 49
• Esquisse d'un Programme or Sketch of a Programme - Grothendieck's 1983 research project, included in his application for a transfer from the university to a research position in the CNRS for the remainder of his career before retirement. This text was later translated into English and published in Geometric Galois Actions vol. I, LMS Lecture Notes 242.
• Pursuing Stacks, in its original typescript version and link to G. Maltsiniotis's page. For some information on how Pursuing Stacks came to be written, see the article by Ronnie Brown.