In an [opinion piece](http://www.ams.org/notices/201001/rtx100100005p.pdf) which appeared in the AMS Notices of January 2010, John Wermer tells us that he once heard about a seminar given by Grothendieck which was described as "a telegram by Grothendieck to Serre". Is this anecdote recorded somewhere?



A telegram by Grothendieck to Serre
I think I heard Grothendieck's talk at the 1958 ICM described as a "a telegram by Grothendieck to Serre". But this would have been in a conversation (with neither Serre nor Grothendieck). I don't know whether anyone said it in a lecture, much less wrote it down.


MR0130879 (24 #A733) Grothendieck, Alexander The cohomology theory of abstract algebraic varieties. 1960 Proc. Internat. Congress Math. (Edinburgh, 1958) pp. 103--118 Cambridge Univ. Press, New York 


Added: I don't know who first described Grothendieck's 1958 ICM talk as a "telegram to Serre", but I probably heard it from Lubin. Since Lubin and the article's author spent their careers at Brown, this fits.


Grothendieck's talk is available [here](http://www.math.jussieu.fr/~leila/grothendieckcircle/CohomologyVarieties.pdf). In it he lays out his plans for schemes and their cohomology. In 1958, not many people would have understood it.


