I am reminded of a fascinating paragraph about Grothendieck from the book The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy. Quoting it from Chapter 12: The Missing P

I am reminded of a fascinating paragraph about Grothendieck from the book The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy. Quoting it from Chapter 12: The Missing Piece of the Jigsaw here: But for Grothendieck this was not abstraction for abstraction's sake. In his view this was a revolution that was necessitated by the questions that mathematics was trying to answer. He wrote volume after volume describing this new language. Grothendieck's vision was messianic, and he began to attract a following of faithful young disciples. His output was huge, covering some ten thousand pages. When a visitor complained at the poor state of the library at the Institut, he replied, 'We don't read books here, we write them'.