ag.algebraic-geometryho.history-overviewsoft-question
Grothendieck, who passed away on November 13, 2014, left a huge amount (around 20.000 sheets) of personal notes in the University of Montpellier that he thought he was the only one to be able to decipher. I heard that this intellectual treasure has been stored even though Grothendieck did not want anyone to publish any of his works.
My question is therefore: has someone begun to examine these notes?
Addressing just the primary question, I think there are clear examples where English-speaking mathematicians have been slow to catch up with developments well-known to German or Russian speakers. One I would mention is the result that surface mappings are generated by twists, published by Dehn in 1938, but rediscovered by Lickorish in 1963. The big advances in the theory of surface mappings due to Thurston in the 1970s were, I think, somewhat slowed by the fact that he had to rediscover many results of Nielsen published in German or Danish in the 1920s.
At a more trifling level, I was once embarrassed to learn that a result I published in 1987 was well-known to Russian mathematicians.
Three examples from the theory of dynamical systems (in a broad sense).
The Fermi-Pasta-Ulam numerical experiments which for the first time exhibited the soliton-like dynamics in a nonlinear system.
Mitchell Feigenbaum's experiments with iterations of the logistic map which led to the discovery of universality in nonlinear systems.
Best Answer
Here is a book (in French) where it is explained in detail how all of Grothendieck's private manuscripts were transported to Paris in November 2015, and saved there in a secure library: