Response to a post of Raman’s Jeevi

 This came as a part of my response to a Telugu post by Ramana Jeevi who said that there is no dictionary which defines a human being (manishi). In my response I used a couple of quotes of Barry Mazur on Grothendieck:

Possibly the same can be said for many words. Wittgenstein said some thing like ‘ that the meaning of a word is—in essence—determined by, in fact is nothing more than, its relations to all the utterances in a language.’ Similar ideas come in the work of the mathematician Grothendieck: ‘mathematical object X is best thought of in the context of a category surrounding it, and is determined by the network of relations it enjoys with all the objects of that category.’

From an obituary for him:

“He admired the HuaYen Buddhists for the attention they paid to the relationships between things rather than the things themselves, in the belief that whatever notions of identity and individuality we have emerge from those relationships.”

Thinking about Grothendieck by Barry Mazur.