In connection with my incoming visit to Vietnam (Ho Chi Min City) for a PhD summer school, I was sent a report written by Alexandre Grothendieck of his 1967 visit to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, around Hanoi, teaching to (North) Vietnamese mathematicians (homological) algebraic geometry and inspiring future generations of local mathematicians. (Visit funded by the Cultural Relations Department of France Foreign Ministry.) This is a striking text, written in a fairly factual tone, and reporting the living conditions of students and faculty at the “evacuated University”, which was a relocation of the University of Hanoi in the countryside, following a general decentralisation of the North Vietnam economy facing massive bombings of urban centers by US forces. What is most impressive to me in this report is the ability to keep operating most aspects of a regular society under extreme duress. Which also finds itself repeated in the incredible resistance of the Ukrainian State against the Russian aggression. (Following this trip, Grothendieck gave his Field medal to the D.R.V. government.)
“Like most more or less public activities, the lectures were scheduled between about 6 and 10 a.m., because the bombing usually took place later in the day, rarely before 11 a.m.”
“Of the many impressions which I brought back from my visit to the D.R.V., perhaps the most striking is the calm confidence in the future which I noticed among everyone with whom I had occasion to speak.”
