[aleph_minus_one]

Even though I am from in a different area of mathematics, I know quite many people who work(ed) in algebraic geometry (and at the university where I graduated there wasn't even an academic chair for (Grothendieck-style) algebraic geometry).

The amount of people I know who would love to learn this material is even many, many magnitudes larger (just to give some arbitrary example: some pretty smart person who studied physics, but (for some reasons) neither had any career prospects in research nor found any fullfilling job, who just out of boredom decided that he would love to get deeply into Grothendieck-style algebraic geometry).

[bubblyworld]

I guess we hang out in different academic circles. I met a single algebraic geometer in my whole academic career. But people are into very different stuff where I come from, which may have biased me (topology, number theory and category theory for the most part, and a lot of relativity/fluid dynamics on the applied side of the department). Based on rough estimates from papers published on arxiv over the last few years, I (very) conservatively estimate there are ~5000 working algebraic geometers in the world right now.

> The amount of people I know who would love to learn this material [...]

I am one of them =) but my point wasn't really about people who want to learn the material (which I assume includes many orders of magnitude more humans) it was about people who already deeply understand it.

[gsf_emergency_4]

It's hard to help GP but I'm gonna try (pls forgive me):

I believe that the masses don't have a deep understanding of Schemes because of enemy action by the sufficiently advanced stupidity (aka loneliness) of the intelligent :)

Some (ex-)academics get triggered by the so-thought foolhardy Buzzard & his undergrads, but B+Co are, at least, not being that kind of imbecile https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/server/api/core/bitstreams/012...

https://github.com/ramonfmir/lean-scheme

Their interest is "pro" and they are not a hypothesis

(& I'd NOT bet against that they understand deeper than Sturmfels and his students)

Schemes (like cat theory) have become a sort of religion-- it's sad because Grothendieck himself might not have understood them intuitively.. and it won't be the first time.. Feynman didn't understand Path Integrals, nor Archimedes integration!! BECAUSE they were all loners whose first resort was WRITING LETTERS

Ps: as with Jobs.. I hesitate to call Buzzard a full-time salesman

If you want to hang out in meatspace: do you have a public key?