Grothendieck's Séminaire de géométrie algébrique

In mathematics, the Séminaire de Géométrie Algébrique du Bois Marie (SGA) was an influential seminar run by Alexander Grothendieck. It was a unique phenomenon of research and publication outside of the main mathematical journals that ran from 1960 to 1969 at the IHÉS near Paris. (The name came from the small wood on the estate in Bures-sur-Yvette where the IHÉS was located from 1962.) The seminar notes were eventually published in twelve volumes, all except one in the Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics series.

The material has a reputation of being hard to read for a number of reasons. More elementary or foundational parts were relegated to the EGA series of Grothendieck and Jean Dieudonné, causing long strings of logical dependencies in the statements. The style is very abstract and makes heavy use of category theory. Moreover, an attempt was made to achieve maximally general statements, while assuming that the reader is aware of the motivations and concrete examples.

The original notes to SGA were published in fascicles by the IHÉS, most of which went through two or three revisions. These were published as the seminar proceeded, beginning in the early 60's and continuing through most of the decade. They can still be found in large math libraries, but distribution was limited. In the late 60's and early 70's, the original seminar notes were comprehensively revised and rewritten to take into account later developments. In addition, a new volume, SGA 4½, was compiled by Pierre Deligne and published in 1977; it contains simplified and new results by Deligne within the scope of SGA4 as well as some material from SGA5, which had not yet appeared at that time. The revised notes, except for SGA2, were published by Springer in its Lecture Notes in Mathematics series.

After a dispute with Springer, Grothendieck refused the permission for reprints of the series. While these later revisions were more widely distributed than the original fascicles, they are still uncommon outside of libraries.

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