Évariste Galois
1811–1832, Bourg-la-Reine, near Paris, France, Paris, France
French mathematician who, before dying at 20 after a duel, determined the precise condition for a polynomial equation to be solvable by radicals and, in doing so, founded what is now called Galois theory and modern group theory.
Galois discovered mathematics as a teenager at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, quickly reading the works of Legendre and Lagrange, but he twice failed the entrance examination to the École Polytechnique and was instead admitted to the École Normale. His father's suicide in 1829, following a scandal engineered by political enemies, deeply affected him. Between 1829 and 1830 he submitted papers on the solvability of equations to the Academy of Sciences, but a memoir sent via Fourier was lost when Fourier died, and a further submission in January 1831 was rejected by Poisson as insufficiently clear.
An ardent republican, Galois was expelled from the École Normale, arrested twice for his political activities, and spent months in prison. On 30 May 1832 he fought a duel under circumstances that remain unclear and was mortally wounded, dying in Cochin hospital the next day at the age of 20. The night before the duel he wrote a letter to his friend Auguste Chevalier outlining his mathematical ideas. His papers were eventually published by Liouville in 1846, revealing the theory, now called Galois theory, that gives the precise criterion for when a polynomial equation is soluble by radicals.
France