Ouch! I suppose you're the guy who came up with title?
For me, the issue was that I didn't know what a "Grothendieck" was and the title doesn't give you any clues either; in fact it explicitly denies that any exist.
It also flouts the convention for fanciful non-fiction titles, which is something like "Clever-or-poetic-part: plain description." Something like "A country of which nothing is known but the name: Grothendieck and mathematical motivation" would be better, I think.
Or maybe, just maybe, it could have been about some actual forgotten country where only name of a city or something survived?
Obviously you can use whatever title you want and be as poetic as you like, but at least in my mind I was going to a very different place than "mathematician".
As for your examples, they don't really fit, since we have way more context about them. If you are going to see a movie with a title "No country for old men", you can be pretty sure that the title wont be literal (unless it's an comedy movie, in which case it might be). As for the quote, most people get that "past" is past and not some place and certainly they are not going to start looking for "yesterday" like you suggest, that's just stupid of you to even suggest. Anyone who is aware that "yesterday" is part of "past" already knows what you are talking about. However most people do not know who or even what Grothendieck, to me it doesn't even seem like a name of a person, but that's just me.
EDIT: You can downvote me all you want, but unless you can come up with coherent response, please think twice why you are downvoting.
Perhaps people expect a title to be either helpful or artful. This one is both less than descriptive and uninteresting. People would probably be be less concerned that it wasn't descriptive if the title was artful or clever.
Thanks - I was certain that the URL and the Title had been messed up - and spent a fruitless 5 or so minutes trying to find the actual article before giving up and coming to the comments. The article has nothing to do with a country.
No we should not suffix the name of every person in post titles with their occupation. Grothendieck is one of the most influential mathematicians of the last century. This is like demanding clarifications like "this article is about Mark Zuckerburg, a CEO"
I agree that the title was intriguing and although I am not fluent in mathematics at the level discussed in the article, I found the biographical sections very interesting and the writing style to be engaging.
Particularly interesting were the comparisons with Boltzmann and Cantor, apparently also "tortured" or at least socially eccentric, geniuses. My understanding of their work is limited but the author of this article seemed to allude to the risks of, or at least correlations with, psychological instability and research at the extreme frontiers of mathematics. (I know this notion is a tired cliche, but still...)
If anyone out there has an understanding of how Grothendieck "deepened the concept of a geometric point" and feels the urge to explain it in layman terms, I have an upvote for you!
So...having read the article (honestly!), I'm still not sure why this is the title.
He bounced around Europe as a young man (due to WWII), but he did the vast majority of his work in France. However, Wikipedia says he was technically stateless because he held off on applying for French citizenship.
I would guess the title an allusion to that--and his reclusiveness later in life, but I still feel like I'm either missing something or something was lost in translation. Is it a quote or paraphrase of something?
Not necessarily, since the internet is notorious for producing awful article titles. (Although usually they're deliberate clickbait rather than this sort of obscureness.) I believe HN's policy is to change the title if it's confusing or inaccurate.
I'm just baffled why this is getting downvotes. If you don't like HN's policy, complain to dang, not me. If you don't think there's a lot of clickbait on the internet, there's really nothing I can do for you.
When I read the title, I assume Grothendieck is a country. You know, because it says "Grothendieck is a country". So maybe you don't need to say "Grothendieck, the mathematician", but the title is specifically going out of its way to be as unclear as possible.
Being an influential mathematician doesn't really put you high on most people's awareness.
But you're misstating the problem. If the title had been "A country of which nothing is known but the name Obama", I would still have assumed that it was about a little-known historical nation that happened to share a name with the last US president. It's just a really weird, confusing title.
http://inference-review.com/article/a-country-known-only-by-...