My first contact with Grothendieck was in the late sixties through a letter to him from a naive grad student (me) asking him if I could come to France and study with his group in Paris as I expected a Canadian post doc which would take me there. In reply, I received a very nice letter from him telling me that I should go to Strasbourg and study with a new student of his, J.-L.Verdier. That the same sort of thing had sent him to Nancy rather than Paris when he was young and he had never regretted it. This I did and learned a hell of a lot. I got to know him personally quite well after that in Buffalo when he came here for two summers in 1970-71 thanks to NSF and the department and (his view) that the IHES was funded by the french military. It was a way that he could fund Survivre. Among others, he gave a beautiful series of advanced lectures on the Grothendieck-Teichmuller group as well as elementary lectures on sheaf theory. Some of these were recorded and were redone more recently by Bill Lawvere . Perhaps now these should become available…. John Duskin [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]