Who is the most badass mathematician ever?

 I will go for the chosen one. Because he is better. “Maybe the best there ever was” (quoting Jean-Pierre Serre).

Now he was not mesmerized by a beautiful woman, spending his last night writing up his final thoughts before being fatally shot in a duel. (Galois.)

He also did not die young after having caught TBC. (Ramanujan.)

He was not a womanizer with many kids shared with many women, did not become schizophrenic, and did not end up as a recluse after throwing a part of his mathematical writings away in a bonfire. (Grothendieck.)

He wasn’t — and isn’t — any of this.

But when he descended into the mathematical world, nothing like this had been seen before.

Ever.

Jacques Tits — Wolf and Abel prize winner and multiple plenary speaker on the ICM, and who started university at 14 — once told an audience that he had a student who corrected Tits’s every statement when he still taught in Brussels.

It started when the boy was 16 and was still a high school student. And he just knew it better.

Some years later, Tits sent the boy to Alexander Grothendieck in France, and the student immediately became “Grothendieck’s equal.”

These were Grothendieck’s words by the way.

Grothendieck also later said that the student had the uncanny ability to immediately understand completely new notions and theory, as if he had worked with them for years.

Many other mathematicians have said the same thing about the same man. The famous Alex Lubotzky said that “he is not human — he must be an alien.”

The alien man has solved problems in one evening after having heard about them on the same day, while other top mathematicians had worked on them for years, on many occasions.

Many of these letters are well known.

And although he is most famous for solving the most difficult of the infamous Weil conjectures, there is so many revolutionary stuff in his repertoire that I can’t do him justice.

Let’s just mention Hodge Theory — a then-new formalism which rocked Algebraic Geometry in a way nobody ever expected, due to its utterly deep originality.

Nobody have ever dreamed of even conjecturing that the Hodge formalism could be true.

But he did.

A couple of years ago, Jean-Pierre Serre — Fields, Wolf, Abel, and contemporary of, and deeply admired, by Grothendieck — told a friend of mine:

“Look, I can understand every of the top notch mathematicians. Grothendieck, Aschbacher, Tao — you name them. I can talk with them about deep research, and understand the main lines and reasons of thought.

But frankly speaking: the level difference between me and an average mathematician is about the same as the difference between Him and me.

I cannot follow his line of thought at all, nor his reasoning. He is so far above me, you cannot understand. He is the best — the best ever.”

So that’s my most badass mathematician for you.

Pierre René Deligne.