Evariste Galois (1811-1832)
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Fictionalization
At the age of 20, Evariste Galois
was mortally wounded in a duel (with either
Perscheux d'Herbinville or Ernest Duchatelet)
over a young lady called
Stéphanie-Félice Poterin du Motel.
Left for dead, Galois (who had no seconds) was discovered by a local peasant
and transported to the Cochin hospital in Paris,
where he died from peritonitis the next day (May 31, 1832).
To his brother Alfred, he had whispered:
Ne pleure pas.
J'ai besoin de tout mon courage pour mourir à 20 ans.
Please don't cry. I need all my courage to die at twenty.
Held on June 2, the funerals of Galois were attended by more than 2000 people and served
as a focal point of republican riots which lasted for several days.
His dubious status as a martyred activist could have remained Galois' main claim
to fame had it not been for his wish to have his last mathematical papers reviewed by
Gauss or Jacobi... His brother, Alfred Galois
and his closest friend Auguste Chevalier
did send out copies of the work, which were apparently ignored by
the originally intended recipients.
In 1842, one of these copies reached
Joseph
Liouville (1809-1882) who finally published
what is now known as Galois Theory, in 1846.
The story is poignant enough as it is, but some biographers are perpetuating the
myth that Galois wrote feverishly all he knew about
Group Theory on the night before the fateful duel, apologizing again and
again for not having the time to do it better...
The leading offender is clearly E.T. Bell (1883-1960) who wrote an emphatic chapter
in his popular 1937 collection of biographies entitled
Men of Mathematics.
Actually, there's only one occurence of such a statement
in all the mathematical manuscripts of Galois
(an "author's note" about an incomplete proof).
Otherwise, the myth seems entirely based on the following sentence which appears in the
letter known as "Galois' Testament",
dated May 29, 1832 and addressed to his friend Auguste Chevalier.
The passage is about what Galois called ambiguity theory
(now associated with Riemann Sheets).
Mais je n'ai pas le temps,
et mes idées ne sont pas encore
bien développées
sur ce terrain, qui est immense.
But I am running out of time, and my ideas are not yet
sufficiently developped
in this field, which is immense.
Until the age of 12, Galois had been schooled entirely by his mother,
Adélaïde-Marie Demante Galois.
Galois was then enrolled at Louis-le-Grand
(the most prestigious lycée of Paris)
as a boarder in the quatrième grade,
on 6 October 1823.
He took his first mathematics class there (under M. Vernier) in Februay 1827
and became enthralled with the subject.
In 1828-1829, Galois was a Mathématiques Spéciales student
under Louis
Richard (1795-1849) at Louis-le-Grand.
Athough he never published anything himself, Richard was an outstanding teacher of
mathematics, in the French
Grandes Ecoles tradition which is still enduring to this day
(see Lucien Refleu, 1920-2005).
Besides Galois, Louis Richard also taught
Urbain
Le Verrier (1811-1877),
Joseph
Serret (1819-1885) and
Charles
Hermite (1822-1901).
In April 1829, on the recommendation of Louis Richard,
Galois had his first paper published
(Proof of a Theorem on Periodic Continued
Fractions) in the Annales de
Gergonne.
On May 25 and June 1, 1829, Galois submitted to the Academy his early research
on equations of prime degree
(such an equation is solvable by radicals if and only if
all its roots are rational functions of any two of them). He was 17.
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