Geometric morphisms, principal bundles & bimodules / Nonabelian Hodge structures (contd.)

0:00 And Jeff says, well, Steve, that sounds a lot like many worlds. And there's someone who, you know, and he said, no, no, no, I don't believe in any world. And Jeff said, well, that's pretty much the special talents of many worlds. And we're like, no, I was like, well, you should really talk to David Wallace about this. And, you know, he's standing right there. So, you know, Jeff talked to David. You know, it feels the same as, you know, you've got religious many worlds, but you really can use that. But it's, it's, it's probably obvious what's going on there. Because there are people who are just completely hung up on the methodological requirements and who want to bracket any question about ontology. And there are people who are hell-bent on having a comprehensive ontology for whom the methodological considerations are just a guide into the correct choice of ontology. And these, these are two fundamentally different castes of mind. Um, but they may very well... But always, you know, you should always ring alarm bells when any philosopher of physics says to you, the only thing you need to understand quantum mechanics is, and that's left the list of my favorite experts.

52:30 We're going back in already? Hi, Jean-Jacques. Hi, ça va? Comment ça va? No excuse. Pourquoi? For Maynard. Oh, no, no, c'est pas grave, c'est pas grave. No, de rien, de rien, de rien, de rien. We'll talk at lunch. Okay, I don't know. Hi, Ben. How are you doing? How are you? I only got here, well I missed it unfortunately. I got here after you started. They wouldn't let me in. Well no, because they wouldn't let anybody in. Well, I thought there were places on the map, but she was saying it was absolutely full, you can't go in.

55:00 Yeah, I'm sure, but I'm sure it was a tour de force. Did you take a seat? No, no, no, I haven't heard anything. So I'll find something if your neighbour's leaving, I guess. But it will all have been recorded, so I'll listen to it anyway. Oh, I need to talk to Paul. Yeah, that's true. Going back in now? Oh, okay. These names are supposed to be quite precise, but it's subjective on close points. No, be careful, because those guys can be done. Yeah. Oh, exactly. Right. Those guys can be done. But this game show is not. So, this game show is going to be a lot of fun. Alright. Angus. Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to disturb. No, no, I didn't mean to. Yeah, I'm fine, but I just wanted to apologize to you for the other evening because I wasn't sure what the hell happened. Well, no, I think it was my fault. I just wanted to go to the loo, and when I came out, I couldn't see you, so I assumed you'd already walked onto the station. So I hurried on down to catch you up. And when I got there, of course, I realized that, in fact... You were still back here, so I don't know how it happened, but that's what must have happened. No, I just kind of just... Ah, no, well, I couldn't see you when I came out, so I thought you must have gone ahead and... Yeah, exactly, exactly, and I'm sure you had a much more interesting conversation, a more worthwhile conversation with them. Speaking about logicians in Paris, Adrian Mathias, of all people, is going to be here. He was in Oxford a few days ago and he's actually speaking in Bristol. I think he was in fact speaking in Bristol yesterday because he was staying with John Mabry but he's actually going to come to stay with me for a couple of days before going back to Réunion but I don't think it'll be possible. How long are you going to be in Paris for?

57:30 No, no, no, he doesn't get here until I think the 22nd, because he's going down to stay in Fouchier. And he's going from here again back to the Union. That's right, yes. And in fact he had asked me to send a couple of his articles, his historical articles, to Pierre, to Pierre Cartier, and arranged for them to have dinner together, which they are doing on the 25th, so I'll be joining them for that. That would be great. I would have gone, had I not been coming here, I would have gone to Oxford to hear his talk, which I think was last Monday, wasn't it? He's talking in Oxford, in Cambridge, and in Bristol. I'm not sure what the sequence was, but anyway, I'll certainly give you his regards. So, you're actually off tomorrow night. So, we... Oh, sure. So, I was wondering when I could get, like, some five or ten minutes to chat with you. Maybe lunch today? Okay, that'd be great. By the way, this is my friend Benoit Duval. He does a tremendous amount of stuff for the Archive. Like, he's constructing our website and doing... Recording more than half the stuff that I can't get to and generally being a great power of strength, so very helpful. Okay, I'll catch you at lunch. Cheers. I know I'm not alone, so I have no problem with that. It is very important to understand this whole motivic theory. It's basically the kind of mother of all cohomology theories, and the way that it does subsume all the other cohomology theories seems to turn very much on the role of derived categories, so I need to really understand the theory of derived categories better.

1:00:00 I think I could sort of see a path, if I had a year of really intensive study, I think I could see a path through the reading I would need to do to get to the point where I could, I still wouldn't be able to. I feel for what was going on. But to be honest, life is short and I think, although motives are tremendously important and obviously one of the greatest things that great and deep created, I actually think I want to spend more of my energy on understanding topos theory more deeply because of understanding exactly what is going on in, you know, in Lord Eyre's work. I was reading, I was actually listening to some of the recordings I made of his talking to me. So his idea is about number. I really, really wanted to understand those better. And that seemed just about on the edge of accessibility to me, this business about typologies in understanding and the stability of coverings under pullback and why should they be stable along completely arbitrary maps and how that gives one the kind of full strength of the Arno axis. It's quite interesting, yeah. And it's just about accessible. Anyway, I'm going to get myself some lunch because I paid for lunch. On the first day, I said I'd have lunch on Thursday. I must talk to Pierre when I get the chance, and also to Angus, so I will stay. You think you might go over the front? If I have a chance to talk to Pierre, I might come with you. I'm going to actually go out to... André has got... well, it's not tickets, but there's a film at the Ecole Normale tonight which I'd quite like to see. An old Pasolini film, The Gospel According to St. Matthew. We might go out and do that. Is this a good moment to talk? Okay, great. I'm sorry to wolf this down, because obviously I told you the other day about this extraordinary discovery of this great and deep archive of recordings, which I'm going to tell Pierre about today.

1:02:30 I don't want to... whatever's in there is obviously going to be of interest, great interest, but I fear that apart from the talks that he gave at the actual... The Buffalo Maths Colloquium, which unfortunately they only appear to have recorded three, and not the most interesting one, not this extraordinary one with his, where he announced this, you know, how to bypass logic program, well that was Bill's, that was Bill's label for it, you know, Greg Dickinson didn't use those words, but it was implicit in what he said. But the actual lectures, well I'm sure there must be very interesting material in that. They were given. At the time, when he was going around the states, trading his coat for his Zaviva schemes, he was renting himself out, as it were, to give, you know, obviously trading on his prestige, to give lectures, to give courses and lectures in return for being given the opportunity to promote his ideas about spirituality and radical ecology and all the rest of it. I hope I'm wrong, but I think that these standards, which of course are not anybody else's standards, these may have been a pretty perfunctory effort, and they may not actually have contained any new ideas, they might have simply been an expose of what for him certainly were perfectly familiar materials. But until I've listened to the whole lot, there are 130 hours in there, it's not going to be possible to say that, but I wouldn't be, I wouldn't, Bill himself has already listened to about 20 hours of it and he says there's no gold, I mean there's no absolute nuggets in there of pure gold. There's not stuff that we didn't know before. The stuff on top of theory is probably the most interesting, but it is essentially expository. All the same, I still think it's, it's still of some significance. And I'm still quite excited by it.

1:05:00 Which year was it on? 1972 and 73, in fact. He gave them over a period of 18 months. I don't think it was actually in Buffalo, the whole of the 18 months, but he was delivering four lecture courses over that period, of which the three main ones, as I say, were one the longest. I've actually already been able to obtain some funding from this, from the German Mathematical Society, that Bill and Jack Duskin are going to Have the whole lot digitalized over there at a recording studio. I was going to go over there and do it myself. In Germany? No, no, no, in Buffalo, in Buffalo. We're going to have everything digitalized in a recording studio. And obviously any audio restoration work that needs to be done. But it seems like it's in pretty good shape for recordings that are that old. And then we will construct a website. They'll actually do most of the work. But that chap that I just introduced to you very briefly there, Benoit will have a hand in that, they'll put together a website which will be called Groton-Deacon Buffalo and they'll upload all the material to that with eventually, I hope, a fairly lengthy introduction by Bill describing the whole background to the talks and a commentary and also, which I think in many ways is perhaps the most interesting single document, this kind of chart that he left with Jack Duskin telling you about the other day. This is a description of the interrelationship between these classifying rings. Bill particularly wants to write up a kind of commentary on that, because he thinks it holds probably the most important ideas that Grinty talked about at that time when he was in Buffalo. So we'll try and get that up within the next, I hope, six to nine months, and upload all the material to it. An overall website for the archive as a whole, of all the material. Since there are 35,000 recordings in there, that's taking a hell of a long time.

1:07:30 The idea would be to put an initial selection, provided we could find somebody who would give us access to a powerful enough institutional server, to stick a selection of perhaps about 300 or 400, perhaps about 100 from each decay, since the early 70s, which is when it goes back. The recordings of Dirac and Wigner. There's a selection of about a hundred from each decay of the most interesting material on the website as an initial sample. And so that's obviously a catalogue made searchable in all the different fields. Threads, speakers, topics. And I think we have a resource which would be, particularly now that it's been formed into a trust, and Roger has very generously agreed to be the chairman of the trustees. We should be in a position to go and get some serious funding for the project of digitalising everything, getting it online. So what I wanted to ask you was, do you think there's any chance that, for instance, Chris Isham said to me the other day when I was talking to him about it in London, he's one of the trustees as well. We're not going to do anything prematurely. I mean, we should definitely get the catalogue completed or virtually completed and at least a selection of material put online first so that it, you know, shows that we have some credibility. Sure. It's not just some kind of pipe dream. But once we did have that, do you think there's any chance the Royal Society or the London Mathematical Society might be able to find some, you know, some sort of, well, basically divvy up something to promote it? I don't see any reason for it not in either case. I mean... I heard that one of the mathematicians is concerned about the bill. Yeah, I actually drafted a proposal. Maths Society about a month ago, which I sent to Chris, he was going to submit it to their council, but that was at the point when we thought we would need the money to go over and digitalise the Grothendieck archive, and in fact we actually got something from that from the German Maths Society as a one-off, so obviously I told him to hold fire on that until, but whether they would be prepared to give us something on a, you know, for more general funding for...

1:10:00 ...constructing the website for the entire archive and starting to get it online. I mean, you know, one can only live in hopes. One can only ask. How is it on the council at the moment? I'm not sure. I haven't heard. I don't know who's been on. Short answer to that is I'm not sure. He suggested approaching them and said, I or Roger and I will sort of put it in front of the council at their next meeting if you draft a proposal. Which, as I say, I did, but then that was... Thank you for watching. And for me to obviously do all the work on that without taking a salary for it, then probably looking about, well, we'd take whatever we could get, but I mean, I think 5,000 would be the kind of thing we'd be asking for straight off, once the thing was. ...online with a selection of recordings. I mean, in the long term, to make things viable, somehow I've got to get enough funding to digitalize the whole thing, which I did actually send you a copy of the proposal that Guido Baccioli and I drew up about 18 months ago. I didn't know. Well, I could send you a copy of that. That was a complete comprehensive funding proposal for the whole thing. I mean, actually kind of putting it on a semi-permanent basis. And paying me a salary of, you know, about 2,500 euros a month as director, which obviously is way, way... Beyond anything we would want to ask the Rolls-Royce Society or the LMS, but in terms of just getting some funding to kick-starting it, about 5,000 would certainly do a lot of the business, I won't even say do the whole business, but it would certainly make a big impression on it. It would certainly speed it up. I think within a year I could certainly... You know, with 5,000, I could certainly complete the work on the website and get the first 300 recordings online. I mean, I think if you were to send me this time, and I could just send things to both, I mean, I'm not, I'm no longer an artist by any means, but I'd certainly allow that, wouldn't I? Yeah. And I will be, you know, if I can, you know, I'll send you...

1:12:30 Well, okay, let's leave it at that. I'll send you... We'll have taken a bit of punishment later. Well, exactly. This is the worst possible time to... I don't really know yet what effect that's going to have on the research. Of course, yes, they didn't give it all to Mr. Madoff to invest for them, no. Well, several American learning societies apparently did, where, catastrophically, not the AMS for example, but... Unfortunately, he's already seen half the value of his pension disappear in six months, yeah, and half of his life savings, I mean, which were invested, of course, by SUNY, so they've made a complete... I'm here to ask American trains to vote. Well, you know, it's a nightmare, of course. I think it's important that you at least float some kind of... Well, exactly, I think... Oh, no, no, we'd obviously put a concrete sum on it and a detailed specification of what it was for. What I'll do is send you a copy of the original proposal that I drafted about a year, or more than a year, about 18 months ago now, with Guido and... Chris, actually, with some input from them, didn't actually do anything about it because the whole point was we wanted to finish the catalogue and have the whole thing further developed, keyed up. Before actually approaching somebody and the shorter version which would just be as it were for the Seedcorn funding for the website and for starting to get stuff online which of course would include all of the Grotendieck material because Bill and Jack have said that as soon as that is digitalized they will offer it to the archive and we can have a mirror site for it and in turn we can offer it you know with their permission to anybody else and London Mathematical Society, IHES and people which is why I need to talk to Pierre. So I mean those are obviously goodies to put in the shop window to put it crudely. I mean, I don't know quite what it is, but this is output in St. Andrews. Someone was just talking to me about that, who have a big history. ...money, and I mean, they... It's very funny you mention that, because somebody, in fact, Steve, um, gosh. The Cat, Don Cat, the number theorist who spoke on the first day, was just asking me about them, and I don't know anything about them. There's two separate things. He possibly was thinking of something different. They have, in the math department, they have a small group who simply are doing a kind of Wikipedia type thing.

1:15:00 Yeah, that's right. There's a big history of math science. I don't think he's the artist. I know they do, but to be honest, ideologically, I would be disinclined to touch them with... But they're all batty neophagians, aren't they? You know, they're living in the dark ages as far as logic is concerned. They don't understand anything that's happened since about 1930. I was amazed how much money they've been able to squeeze out. I know, I know. To be honest, I think it's a monstrous con. I think what happened was that Crispin Wright very cleverly coined this phrase, Hume's Principle. ...to label Frege. Am I fighting against this kind of stuff? Well, of course. I couldn't agree more. You're singing to the choir, Angus. But you very cleverly coined this pernicious and I think completely batty... The principle, Hume's principle, well, the principle is not bad, the principle is just absolutely trite, but he gave it this label, knowing that the Scottish executive would give you up for something named after the one Scottish philosopher that all Scots have heard of. I'm sorry, I hope I'm not being unduly cynical. Absolutely not. I mean, I remember many years ago when he invited me to a protest, and I mean, he was forced to assemble examiners, doing what he had done. It is absolutely weird, and it really is the sort of thing that gets philosophy of mathematics a bad name, because any mathematician worth their salt who is doing real math, like you, and who knows what has happened to model theory in the last 40 years... And who understands the depth of the connections with all these cutting-edge ideas of Groton-Deacon will just laugh at what they're doing. No, I remember... I mean, they've spent 20 years on this programme and they still can't even define a real number. Well, I guess there must have been something that I read that I thought... I was completely amazed. Yes, I know they've got loads of money. And they're actually nice guys. I mean, I know Crispin quite well. And some of the people there. But the trouble is they're all philosophers. And they have done the only math they know, because it's the math that they teach them in philosophy departments, which is, you know, sort of second-order logic and set theory to sort of, well, really scarcely to more than undergraduate level. I mean, nothing that they do, as far as I can see, engages with anything that you would recognize as, you know, as real, sort of, serious math.

1:17:30 This is precisely the defect of the so-called philosophy of math that I've been fighting against for the last 20 years. I mean, since I got Bill to Cambridge for that meeting, I actually want us to be starting doing philosophy of real math. And just in the same way as philosophy of physics has been absolutely revolutionized in the last 20 or 30 years and now is very in very close touch with its mother subject and I mean there are people in philosophy departments doing work in loop quantum gravity and they're taken quite seriously by people in theoretical physics. The communities are actually exchanging a lot of ideas but in philosophy math is nothing like that at all. I'm just checking to see who's, I mean, in cases when any flow in there are slightly more open-minded people, because they have a lot of money. Well, to be honest, I hadn't even thought of approaching them, but if there was any possibility of getting some funding for an archive like this, I have actually recorded some of their stuff, but to be honest, I found it was such dreck, I'm afraid, or so I felt, that I gave up on doing that. What, useful for a historical record of people who have been barking up completely the wrong tree, I suppose. Just to see how it was, what they were doing. Well, I mean, if you want to get in a time machine and go back to Jena in 1884 and talk to Frege, I mean, sure, that would be very interesting to record that and sit him down in front of a tape recorder with Hilbert, but, I mean, trying to rescue, trying to rescue neologicism in this day and age. No, that's the problem. History and mathematics never gets any money. They're always the poor relations. I mean, I spoke to Jeremy Gray, he knows about the Grosvenor material, and he's been very helpful, and they might, the SHM might be able to find something like five or six hundred quid, but I mean, that for them is already big money, you know. Well I'll send you, I'll send you what I wrote a year ago. It's obviously slightly overtaken by events as far as the Grotendieck thing is concerned, and anything, you know, well this is actually why I wanted to get this, why I wanted to talk to you here, because Chris had said they were meeting in February. So I'll send it to you as soon as I get back to Fouché, I'll try to even send it to you while I'm here, so I've got it all in my...

1:20:00 ...and take it from there. And obviously, let me make sure I've got all your coordinates and emails and ways of getting in touch with you before you split. Well, thanks a lot, Angus. That's very useful. Nice and warm in here. They're recording everything here at this website, so I shall probably go tomorrow to the Salle Campanile. I might see you there.

1:30:00 Maybe it's possible for us to find a copy of this? No, no. You won't get it because I gave a copy to Alain Cohn. I understand, I understand, I understand. And I gave it to Alain Cohn and I said, here, this is for you and this is for me. Yes, yes, yes, I understand. It's a very good gift. I did this. A very good, very nice gift. I asked him, did I want to give a lecture in Oxford? He gave a lecture, I just stopped. Is it possible to see this second conference that you are talking about?

1:32:30 No, no, this is a video. Ah, yes, I understand. Yes, yes, yes. But you are talking about... Excuse me. The second... No, no. I understood you said you made a second conference, a second presentation. Yes, you said 97. Composer. There are so many. Yes, it was not clear if. I know the name. Then there was total silence. We didn't hear anything for the next. We didn't hear anything for two hours. There was no music. They brought it back in. John Cage recited it. 53, isn't it? 53. Exactly. That was the point. But do you know? It was, it was, it was, I do apologize.

1:37:30 In Portugal, yes, I've been there. Yes, I was in Lisbon at that time.

1:40:00 So it is the second one. Okay, of course, you'll be the one. I'll tell you about it tomorrow. In 2000, they had this very fiery debate.

1:42:30 Are you going to be here tomorrow? Oh, okay. Give me now and I'll write her. If you give me a second one, I'll send them to you. No, no, but for tomorrow. That's my email. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, I'll send you an email. Okay. Thank you. You too. Thank you. Thank you. And you, okay. Have a good day. No, he was telling me about the... Thank you for watching. Oh, of course, I'm still thinking like an Englishman. I do this all the time. I do this all the time. I'm sorry. But, no, he's a delightful man. He was telling me all about this conference for Alan Kong's birthday in Portugal. I was wondering if they made this video. Would we be interested in a copy for the archive? Yes, they made a video of the conference of Kong's birthday. Not the one they had here, but another one they had in Lisbon. Yeah, sure, absolutely. Yeah, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. He just saw the thing I was wearing that said Archive of Mathematical Sciences, so he was asking me about it and we got talking and he just said that he had this, he had made these two videos of this, excuse me, in honour of Alan Corn's birthday.

1:45:00 And we just got talking generally. Very good form. I had a very good talk with Angus MacIntyre also in the lunch break. Ah, your friend of... Yes, the English, well, Scottish actually, named like Angus MacIntyre. Yes, he's a very distinguished mathematician. He's a fellow of the Royal Society. He's the professor at Edinburgh. But, well, of course, by the standards of the people in that room today, he is... He was one of the people who came with Cartier to Fougere to interview Lorvier three years ago, so nearly two weeks, and he was there, so yeah, he was in my house for two weeks with Colin McLarty and with Lorvier and Cartier. Yes, well, in fact, he wasn't there for the whole time, he was there for about a day. I hope that's something I tried on for two weeks, yes, which was with Laurent Cointreau with Laudere. We spent, well we didn't actually have interviews every day, there were a couple of days where we just went out into the country for fresh air, but for 12 of the days we had interviews, intensive interviews, which we spent almost a year preparing for, interviewing Lothar about every aspect of his work, his foundational ideas, and the idea was to try and do something similar with Penrose eventually and also with Cartier himself. I do it wherever it's going to be convenient for them. Of course, the beauty of doing it in Puget was that they could come and stay there and I didn't have to, the expenses were low, the heads of everything were unlimited. I mean, at the moment I couldn't afford to do anything else like that. This was when I still had a little bit of money put by, but it was an extremely useful exercise because I, you know, we were really able, especially with Cartier and McIntyre, because McIntyre uses Grotenbeek's ideas a great deal in his work. He essentially applies these ideas from algebraic geometry to model theory and to logic. So he was very good and he built a lot about Bill's ideas about numbers and about the technology program and he also got on very well with Cartier and in fact I just told him about the Groton being recorded now, but not Cartier but Angus. He was extremely enthused. He thinks that he can

1:47:30 No, no, the guy from Scotland, the Scottish guy, the guy from Portugal, I only just met for the first time, you know, just got chatting with him, I say, because he kind of knows the car. No, Angus, as I say, who I know well, who has actually stayed with me for, and who is extremely, extremely kind-hearted, very gentle spirit, delightful man, he thinks that with the programming thing... As well as with, you know, the overall archive that he's pretty confident that he's on the council of the London Mathematical Society and he thinks that he can get some money from them and possibly also from the Royal Society. I mean, you know, not a huge amount, but maybe some 5,000 pounds, so, you know, it's hopeful. It's another hour in the park. The good news, though, is that Alexei Grinval told me yesterday that he can definitely let us have 2,000 euros. And this would be specifically for the construction of a website for the whole archive. Well, in fact, there would be some flexibility about how I could use it, but he said, but what he would need, this is where I need to talk to you, what he would need would be invoices with, not necessarily exhaustive detail, but invoices with a statement of exactly what the work was that had needed to be done or had been done on the website and on the uploading of reports. So he asked, in fact he asked me who would be designing this website, so I mentioned you, I said probably my friend Benoit. Well I didn't say, I didn't make any commitment, I just said possibly, he asked me a question, I'm not saying he would, but he said well if that's the case, then in order to release the money, you know, he would have to have invoices. So, he asked, do you actually have a production company? Do you actually have a company, or not at the moment, as they get just the invoices you want? That would probably be okay, but the only thing is, you wouldn't have a VAT number or a SREP number or anything like that, would you?

1:50:00 No, but you can't do that to be sold anyway. Well, I mean, you probably can. The only thing is I'm not quite certain. You know, I'd have to ask Alexei what their rules allow. It's just that obviously Alexei has rules that they have to conform to when they do hand out money. It might... I'll ask him. He seemed to be very positive about it. He said you can definitely have 2,000 euros. But he said, you know, we would have to have... It may be that there's a requirement that it has to be a registered company. In which case, it's a bit of a pain because there will never be a problem. No, he wasn't, you know, I don't think he's going to put obstacles in the way. He was very, he was very, and he was very flexible because he said it doesn't have to be in connection with the very big thing. It can be just for the construction of a website. And he could let me have it, you know, within a month as soon as he's got the invoices. But he does have to have the invoices before. In other words, the rules don't allow him just to write a blank cheque for the archives to say, you know, use this for advice. It has to be for some specific work. So it could be a waste of time? Well, this is what I need to talk to you about. We could discuss this. I mean, we could discuss what is the best way of proceeding. We could think about this this weekend. Well, for instance, one of the things we could invoice him for would be making... I mean, it doesn't have to be... I don't know if it's spelled out exactly in the invoice, but, you know, like completing these videos of the mines, you know, transferring the, once you get the, well, first of all, you can bill him for the tape deck himself. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, no, no, he made that quite clear. It can include hardware as well as services. So, we could bill him for the tape decks. And we could build him for the work of transferring the audio sets to the DVD and we could build him for say preliminary work on the design of the website and then we can sit down and think what the other things are that we... It can't be used directly for a salary, but it can be used for any kind of services that you or I provide, and for equipment. I'm not telling you how we should use it, I'm just saying we should sit down and something out of the next 30 days and think about how to do it.

1:52:30 I'm thinking it might even stretch to paying to go down to Montpellier to record the thing at MAP, but the only thing is it would be afterwards, it could only be done retrospectively. Knowing French bureaucracy, we'll probably take down three master cultures anyway. He did say quite categorically that he had allocated 2,000 euros in the budget for all we are now, so... Is it at this point included? I'm not sure about that. As I say, I'm not sure about that. But certainly equipment and certainly services like... Designing a website or transferring recordings, uploading them to the website, or transferring them from the set to digital files. Sorry, are these including these main steps? Main steps? Yes, yes. Because you need to choose whatever it is. No, no, no, I said to you that he doesn't... No, no, no, no, no, he specifically said it doesn't have to be connected with the Grothi thing. The Archive in general? The Archive in general. No, that's the whole point. That was why it was such good news. No, no, no, no, it doesn't... In fact, he specifically said it doesn't have to be connected with the Grothi thing. And in fact, that's good because with the Grothi thing, Bill is now saying that he wants... He wants Jack and himself to do the whole thing in Buffalo. He wants to do the whole thing in Buffalo. By himself? Well, not himself personally, but he wants to use a recording studio in Buffalo. He's promised me that I can have a complete set and the whole digital copy of the thing as a result. But he doesn't any longer want me to actually go over there and copy them, which is okay. I mean, I think it's just partly that Jack Duskin is kind of slightly getting a bit possessive about the thing, so I don't want to push it. As Bill has said, and Bill has never lied to me about anything, I know he's promised, he said that I guarantee that you will get a complete set of copies. So a set of copies or a digitalization? No, a digital copy of the digitalized copy. Ah, so a digitalized copy. They will digitalize it over there, probably using the guy that we spoke to at CONICOM, you know, the guy at the recording studio, yeah, or another recording studio, but I think they'll, they will do that, they will pay for that, they want to pay for that, and then they will let me have a complete set of copies.

1:55:00 I would still have felt more comfortable if I could have gone over there and done it myself, because I knew it wouldn't be done. But he is saying that they definitely will do it. So as you say, it does save money and time. In principle, it should. But then of course it also means I can't ask people here for money to go to the States to The only stipulation is that the website must say You know, this website was created with the support and help of, you know, Larson, you know, that's the last line. As long as it's not, again, an exclusive... The problem was that the quantum theory seminar went on until after 1 o'clock and then Alexei said come out to lunch and that was of course when we did all this talking about the archive so I didn't actually leave there until about 10 past 3 which is why I missed the IHB thing but it was very good because the major results and getting this all agreed. So, you know, we definitely have a clear undertaking from then to... And that they will pay, as I say, for either equipment or services, provided that it's obviously relevant to the work of the archive. And nothing exclusive, there's nothing at all to stop us applying for other support. He knows perfectly well that €2,000 is not going to keep the archive going for long, but it's still very useful to have. And the only condition is that there should be a thanks saying, which you actually sent me an email with the wording. They want just saying that this or this website was created with the assistance or with the support of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

1:57:30 Well, the thing is, there already is this website, which this guy Matthew Brown created, I know. Well, we can take that website and we can work with that. In fact, what we may be able to build him for is the actual uploading of the report. I still have not spoken to Matthew Brown about the completion of that website, which has now been Matthew Brown? Matthew, isn't it actually? Matthew? Matthew? Yeah, he's the guy who was working on it. Unfortunately, I... Well, it's my fault. I just had so many things to do when I was over in England. I just didn't... He's in Wales. Step by step. Step by step, as you say. I'll try contacting him. I'll try speaking to him tonight or sometime in the next couple of days. But that was a very good result for you, Alexei, yesterday, and I'm also talking to Anders today, and tomorrow I am going to talk to Katya about various things, including getting copies of all of the VDs that they have made, not just this meeting, but the ones last year, and the ones at Conn and Bergen-Yard, because he said that in There should be no problem with Elizabeth Jasson-Meyer, but the only thing is she says she must have something in writing in terms of what she says, and that's the authorise. It's very difficult for me, so that's fine. I want to get that tomorrow, and then as soon as we get the tape decks, then we'll say we'll finish on the day. There are a number of different fields of study in Montpellier, including mathematics, geometry, mathematics, physics, mathematics, physics, mathematics, physics, mathematics, physics, mathematics, physics, mathematics, physics, mathematics, physics, mathematics, physics, mathematics, mathematics, physics, mathematics, mathematics, physics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, And it's horribly expensive, the TGV, to go to Montpellier. I was really surprised how expensive it was.

2:00:00 Do you want to talk about my flat for a moment? Sure, sure, yeah, yeah, just for five minutes. Well, I've got to go, I'm going to see this film in Vandere tonight, so... Yeah, but I'll come to the back. Anyway, I would have to be something like around five at the latest. That's fine. Yeah, I'll just have a coffee, if that's all right with you. Well, that's no problem. It's fine. I mean, I'll just catch the tube over to... He's got a friend, this Russian historian guy, Androshen, who's coming over to have drinks. I was in the platform train yesterday evening. Yes, I know. He told me. Well, actually, it was the day before, two days ago. No, no, no, yesterday. Yesterday? Yeah, I see. No, he said that you were there the day before. Yes, you were there two days running. Are you sure? Yeah, probably. Okay. I think he said you were there the day before yesterday. Don't go fast. No, no. He was there the day before. I know because I had just missed you. I came in literally. He said... He just left. He said, oh, Benoit's just left. He left five minutes ago. You just missed him. I don't know. No, it definitely was Tuesday. Yeah, it was Wednesday. Yesterday I came back earlier and I actually said to him, did you see Benoit again today? And he said no, he didn't come to the seminar. Because he went to this thing with Girard. Which, unfortunately, I haven't been to. Which was interesting. Yes, I'm really sorry I've missed those. I think I have got to be a bit more selective about the things I attend and record, because otherwise I'm just never going to get them. I mean, I realize listening to these conversations that I've had with... Or here in Calais in June about very key topologies and these ideas about numbers. I mean, just how important that material is. I really should, I think, make more of a priority to transcribe that stuff and to write it up and to prepare for another set of interviews with him. Because you can only do so much in a lifetime. You know, if I just try and record everything, I'm just going to end up... Well, I'm going to end up dying with a house full of, you know, 50, 100,000 recordings and none of them will ever have been...

2:02:30 I mean, quality and quality. I'm always in the center. Absolutely, exactly. I'm more and more conscious that I should really make more of an effort to... Which is always difficult. It is, it is. Because you see, you have to be ruthless. Because you see things that look really interesting. I really want to go to that. But you really have to prioritize. It is difficult. I really do have to prioritize. And particularly, you see, provided I've got the assurance that we can get copies of the DVDs and these reports, there's not any reason why really I have to be there. Although it is very interesting. I certainly am glad I was able to get something else. That's why tomorrow, although I'm going to come in the morning, I must speak to Katya about... Well, about the DVDs and also about rugby, you know, but what I... It's a mystery also, Michael. I think sometimes it's good to be there physically also. Oh, yes, I agree, especially when it's... You will live the moment. Yes, of course. Well, that was especially so today. And that's the first time I've ever seen Sir. Oh yes, it's the first time I've ever met Sir. I didn't meet him, but I didn't even just see him. It's the first time I've ever seen Sir. Weren't you there in the EHP last time? No, no, no. This time I never, I never. It was the first time I ever saw Sir. I was very first time there. No, no, I've never seen Sir. I've never seen Sir. I've seen Deligne. I've heard Deligne give a couple of talks. I heard him give a couple of talks here in Paris and also in Basel last year. I think I've heard him give a talk in Oxford as well. I've probably heard him give about five talks all together and recording them, but I never saw Sal recording them. He's actually, well, he certainly is. Well, after Groton, he's actually the greatest French mathematician in this generation. Well, I think most people would regard him as being there, you know, just absolutely. The open sense of that is very, very different.