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I have always wondered whether there is an English translation of Grothendieck's EGA (Elements de Geometrie Algebrique) available. Does anyone know whether there is and if so where I can find it? If not, are there English texts that cover similar material to the EGA that you would recommend? (My knowledge of French is very rudimentary, and while I can roughly make meaning out of some (non-mathematical) passages, it seems (from what I have heard) that some mastery of French is necessary to leisurely read the EGA.)

Amitesh Datta
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    Unfortunately there is no English translation. This has been discussed a bit here: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/17778/books-you-would-like-to-see-translated-into-english/17781#17781 – Kevin H. Lin Jul 13 '10 at 01:55
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    Anyone who told you mastery of French is necessary doesn't know what they're talking about. I cannot read a French menu or anything "real", but mastered EGA and read lots of SGA. I skip words when context makes it clear what is going on. I pay no attention at all to endings, or really any point of French grammar whatsoever (since I don't know any). Just take English and French copies of a book of Serre and make index cards of the basic little words. It's really not that hard; just need practice. If you plan to use such math, you need to read papers in that kind of math French. – BCnrd Jul 13 '10 at 01:56
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    If you learned enough Latin in your English (as it were) then mathematical French is not that big a jump, especially if you have -- as Brian suggests -- a sample of mathematical French that you either know well or have an accurate translation of. Oh, and "soit" = "let (it be)". – Yemon Choi Jul 13 '10 at 02:11
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    By the way, just so I am not misunderstood, I am not suggesting that it is a bad idea to learn French. Au contraire, it is a beautiful-sounding language and I really wish I had learned it. But it's sort of "too late" for me. On the other hand, if you really are 15 as you indicate, then by all means go for it (and for goodness' sake, please learn more basic things in math like classical algebraic geometry before delving into this fancy stuff; otherwise you may discover one day that your head screwed on backwards; there is really no rush to be blasting so far ahead). – BCnrd Jul 13 '10 at 02:42
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    BCnrd, I did precisely what you suggest using Serre's "Linear representations of finite groups" and some analysis book (Dixmier's?) some 15 years ago in preparation to French competency exam at Yale, which usually consisted of translating a page of a math book for a professor who'd agree to "give" it. It worked beautifully! I didn't have the balls to ask Lang, and fortunately, the book I got wasn't EGA :) – Victor Protsak Jul 13 '10 at 04:07
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    @BCnrd Thanks for your comment! My French is not good, sadly, but at least I can do Hartshorne for now. (But I agree that I should learn French; I have learnt a decent amount of Spanish and this could help.) With regards to your other comment, I have done Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis, Munkres' Topology: A First Course, and Isaacs Algebra: A Graduate Course, and am currently doing Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis so I have (I hope) been doing mathematics in a systematic order. I wouldn't even think of Grothendieck's EGA if I didn't have a background in these areas! – Amitesh Datta Jul 13 '10 at 04:58
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    These days I think you might be able to get away with switching back and forth between the English and French versions of the Wikipedia article on algebraic geometry. – Qiaochu Yuan Jul 13 '10 at 05:07
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    Amitesh, for some hands-on experience with schemes in a more "arithmetic" viewpoint, also take a good look at Q. Liu's book "Algebraic geometry and arithmetic curves". Very rich selection of examples, computations, and exercises (e.g., blow-ups, issues related to general ground field, general dvr's, integral models of curves, etc.). @Qiaochu: I don't know how Wikipedia articles are "translated", but it is hard to believe that it's not better to first learn basic general math French from comparing some book(s) of Serre in English & French. – BCnrd Jul 13 '10 at 08:11
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    @BCnrd Liu looks like an excellent book. (Based on its google preview.) Thank you very much for this suggestion! I especially like the fact that it looks very nearly self-contained, whereas Hartshorne requires a good deal of commutative algebra to read. – Amitesh Datta Jul 13 '10 at 08:30
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    @Amitesh, See http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Mathematics-Languages-English-Russian/dp/0444997067 and http://www.math.unicaen.fr/~reyssat/dico/dicofa.html and http://french.about.com/library/vocab/bl-math.htm. If you search, you might find more. – SandeepJ Jul 14 '10 at 14:43

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Yes, ish. There is a community effort (https://github.com/ryankeleti/ega) to translate the EGA into English. I’m posting this now because we’ve just finished EGA I, and around 30% of the combined EGA 0.

Update: EGA II is also finished :-)

Tim
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    Thank you guys, really appreciate the work. – Rick Apr 03 '20 at 19:20
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    You have missed some things in your translation: for example, in the proof of Ch1 S2 (1.2.2.3) there is no definition of Y=V(a), but you use this notation there anyway . – P. Grabowski Feb 03 '21 at 17:18
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    thanks for pointing that out, I'll add in that missing line now :) sadly there are literally hundreds of pages, so the chances of us not making small mistakes here and there are basically zero – Tim Feb 03 '21 at 17:46
  • Hi Tim. Sorry for the late comment, but how do you compile the document? On the website it simply says "make book, make pdfs, or make all", but I don't know what exactly I am supposed to be doing. I've downloaded the Github file, and have MacTex installed on my computer, but I think I am doing something wrong. – Joe Mar 20 '24 at 17:07
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    Hi @Joe , thanks for the question. At the moment the code is a bit spread out, so to compile the document you need to open up a terminal/command prompt and run the command make book in order to compile the whole book, for example. I think you can also just try compiling the individual .tex files (e.g. ega1.tex) directly. Or you can just download the PDFs from https://github.com/ryankeleti/ega/releases ! :-) – Tim Mar 21 '24 at 21:21
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    Thanks for the help Tim. For those who are not used to running their computer from the terminal, it might be worth recording here that before writing the command make book, you must first "navigate" in the terminal to the path where the EGA-master folder is located. (Please correct me if I am mistaken here.) – Joe Mar 26 '24 at 14:23