"For our genius of a father did not limit himself to math. His brain was an octopus, the tentacles of which extended in all directions. He could scan Latin verse and Greek verse as well, and it was as if he were hearing Homer or Theocritus in person. Not to mention the fact that he read Greek from volumes filled with characters which in no way resembled the ones in our Greek grammar or book of excerpts from Greek literature. He also read Sanskrit, with its truly bizarre letters. He spoke Italian like Dante, Spanish like Cervantes, and so for almost every living language."

“The lives they lived: Andre Weil; Numbers Man" by Paul Hoffman in The New York Times”

“... the geometry over p-adic fields, and more generally over complete local rings, can provide us only with local data; and the main tasks of algebraic geometry have always been understood to be of a global nature. It is well known that there can be no global theory of algebraic varieties unless one makes them "complete", by adding to them suitable "points at infinity," embedding them, for example, in projective spaces. In the theory of curves, for instance, one would not otherwise obtain such basic facts as that the number of poles and zeros of a function are equal, of that the sum of residues of a differential is 0.”

“A 1940 Letter of André Weil on Analogy in Mathematics”

“Yes, but there is the problem. It would have been banal. Mediocre. We had been trained to despise everything which was not excellent. How disgusting to see the father of one of our classmates or friends on vacation playing cards or, even worse, siting on the sofa watching television. We blush with shame for our unfortunate little friend.”

“When he was not busy doing math, he reads fat books covered with rough leather, on the pages of which can be seen very old, perfectly round holes dug out by medieval worms. Or else he passes through a museum while devoting himself to unbelievably profound notions about Van Gogh's paintings or Greek amphorae.”

“Alexandre Grothendieck was very different from Weil in the way he approached mathematics: Grothendieck was not just a mathematician who could understand the discipline and prove important results—he was a man who could create mathematics. And he did it alone.”