9 2011 年春天,在南京大学举办的“代数 K- 理论及其应用
国际会议”期间, 笔者曾经就此事请教了马克斯 • 卡鲁比教授。
会议之后,卡鲁比教授给笔者写下了这段史实:When I started to
write my PhD thesis in 1964/65, I showed the first version of it to
Grothendieck since I was visiting the IHES very often at this time. He
then learned from me this notion of “idempotent completion” which
I used to define the category of vector bundles. More precisely, the
idempotent completion of the category of trivial vector bundles is the
category of ALL vector bundles (on a compact space or a topological
space of finite dimension).