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Évariste Galois (October 25, 1811 – May 31, 1832) was a French mathematician born in Bourg-la-Reine. While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a long-standing problem. His work laid the fundamental foundations for Galois theory, a major branch of abstract algebra, and the subfield of Galois connections. He was the first to use the word "group" (French: groupe) as a technical term in mathematics to represent a group of permutations. A radical Republican during the monarchy of Louis Philippe in France, he died from wounds suffered in a duel under murky circumstances at the age of twenty.

Early life

Budding mathematician

He passed, receiving his degree on 29 December 1829. His examiner in mathematics reported:"This pupil is sometimes obscure in expressing his ideas, but he is intelligent and shows a remarkable spirit of research."

His memoir on equation theory would be submitted several times but was never published in his lifetime, due to various events. As previously mentioned, his first attempt was refused by Cauchy, but he tried again in February 1830 after apparently following Cauchy's suggestions, and submitted it to the Academy's secretary Fourier, to be considered for the Grand Prix of the Academy. Unfortunately, Fourier died soon after, and the memoir was lost. The prize would be awarded that year to Abel posthumously and also to Jacobi. Despite the lost memoir, Galois published three papers that year which laid the foundations for Galois theory.

Political firebrand

Galois lived during a time of political turmoil in France. Charles X had succeeded Louis XVIII in 1824, but in 1827 his party suffered a major electoral setback and by 1830 the opposition liberal party became the majority. Charles, faced with abdication, staged a coup d'état, and issued his notorious July Ordinances, touching off the July Revolution which ended with Louis-Philippe becoming king. While their counterparts at the Polytechnique were making history in the streets during the les Trois Glorieuses, Galois and all the other students at the École Normale were locked in by the school's director. Galois was incensed and he wrote a blistering letter criticizing the director which he submitted to the Gazette des Écoles, signing the letter with his full name. Despite the fact that the Gazette's editor redacted the signature for publication, Galois was, predictably, expelled for it.

Even before his expulsion from the Normale was to take effect on January 4 1831, Galois joined the staunchly Republican Artillery unit of the National Guard. These and other political affiliations continually distracted him from mathematical work. Due to controversy surrounding the unit, soon after Galois became a member, on December 31, 1830, the artillery of the National Guard was disbanded out of fear that they might destabilize the government. At around the same time, nineteen officers of Galois' former unit were arrested and charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government.

In April, all nineteen officers were acquitted of all charges, and on May 9, 1831, a banquet was celebrated in their honor, with many illustrious personalities, such as Alexandre Dumas present. The proceedings became more riotous, and Galois proposed a toast to King Louis-Philippe with a dagger above his cup, which was interpreted as a threat against the king's life. He was arrested the following day, but was later acquitted on June 15.

On the following Bastille Day, Galois was at the head of a protest, wearing the uniform of the disbanded artillery, and came heavily armed with several pistols, a rifle, and a dagger. For this, he was again arrested, this time sentenced to six months in prison for illegally wearing a uniform. He was released on April 29, 1832. During his imprisonment, he continued developing his mathematical ideas.

Final days

Galois returned to mathematics after his expulsion from the Normale, although he was constantly distracted in this by his political activities. After his expulsion from the Normale was official in January 1831, he attempted to start a private class in advanced algebra which did manage to attract a fair bit of interest, but this waned as it seemed that his political activism had priority. Simeon Poisson asked him to submit his work on the theory of equations, which he submitted on January 17. Around July 4, Poisson declared Galois' work "incomprehensible", declaring that " argument is neither sufficiently clear nor sufficiently developed to allow us to judge its rigor", however, the rejection report ends on an encouraging note: "We would then suggest that the author should publish the whole of his work in order to form a definitive opinion." While Poisson's rejection report was made before Galois' Bastille Day arrest, it took some time for it to reach Galois, which it finally did in October that year, while he was imprisoned. It is unsurprising, in the light of his character and situation at the time, that Galois reacted violently to the rejection letter, and he decided to forget about having the Academy publish his work, and instead publish his papers privately through his friend Auguste Chevalier. Apparently, however, Galois did not ignore Poisson's advice and began collecting all his mathematical manuscripts while he was still in prison, and continued polishing his ideas until he was finally released in April 29, 1832.

A month after his release, on May 30, was Galois' fatal duel. The true motives behind this duel that ended his life will most likely remain forever obscure and there has been a lot of speculation, much of it spurious, as to the reasons behind it. What is known is that five days before his death he wrote a letter to Chevalier which clearly alludes to a broken love affair. Some archival investigation on the original letters reveals that the woman he was in love with was apparently a certain Mademoiselle Stéphanie-Felice du Motel, the daughter of one of the resident physicians in the prison where he was transferred shortly before his release and where he remained thereafter. Fragments of letters from her copied by Galois himself (with many portions either obliterated, such as her name, or deliberately omitted) are available, and they seem to indicate that he was rejected and took it badly. The letters also give some intimation that Mlle. du Motel had confided some of her troubles with Galois, and this might have prompted him to provoke the duel himself on her behalf. This conjecture is also supported by some of the other letters Galois later wrote to his friends the night before he died. Much more detailed speculation based on these scant historical details has been interpolated by many of Galois' biographers (most notably by Eric Temple Bell in Men of Mathematics and by Fred Hoyle in Ten Faces of the Universe), such as the oft-repeated conjecture that the entire incident was stage-managed by the police and royalist factions to eliminate a political enemy.

As to his opponent in the duel, Alexandre Dumas names Pescheux d'Herbinville, one of the nineteen artillery officers on whose acquittal the banquet that occasioned Galois' first arrest was celebrated. However, Dumas is alone in this assertion, and extant newspaper clippings from only a few days after the duel give a description of his opponent which is inconsistent with d'Herbinville, and more accurately describes one of Galois' Republican friends, most probably Ernest Duchatelet, who was also imprisoned with Galois on the same charges. Given the conflicting information available, the true identity of his killer may well be equally lost to history.

Whatever the reasons behind the duel, Galois was so convinced of his impending death that he stayed up all night writing letters to his Republican friends and composing what would become his mathematical testament, the famous letter to Auguste Chevalier outlining his ideas. Hermann Weyl, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, said of this testament, "This letter, if judged by the novelty and profundity of ideas it contains, is perhaps the most substantial piece of writing in the whole literature of mankind." However, the legend of Galois pouring his mathematical thoughts onto paper the night before he died seems to have been exaggerated. In these final papers he outlined the rough edges of some work he had been doing in analysis and annotated a copy of the manuscript submitted to the academy and other papers. On 30 May 1832, early in the morning, he was shot in the abdomen and died the following day at ten in the Cochin hospital (probably of peritonitis) after refusing the offices of a priest. He was 20 years old. His last words to his brother Alfred were:

Ne pleure pas, Alfred ! J'ai besoin de tout mon courage pour mourir à vingt ans ! (Don't cry, Alfred! I need all my courage to die at twenty.)

Much of the drama surrounding the legend of his death has been attributed more to one source than any other - Eric Temple Bell's Men of Mathematics.

Galois' mathematical contributions were finally fully published in 1843 when Liouville reviewed his manuscript and declared it sound. It was finally published in the October-November 1846 issue of the Journal des mathématiques pures et appliquées. The most famous contribution of this manuscript was a novel proof that there is no quintic formula, that is, that 5th and higher degree equations are not solvable by radicals. Note: Abel had already proved the impossibility of a "quintic formula" by radicals in 1824; Ruffini had published a solution in 1799 that turned out to be flawed. But Galois' methods led to deeper research in what is now called Galois Theory. For example, one can use it to determine, for any polynomial equation, whether or not it has a solution by radicals.

Galois in theatre

A play about Galois' life by Sandy Easton entitled 'The Life of Evariste Galois' is to be performed at the Edinburgh Fringe festival 2007. The play premiered on 25th October 2006 (the 195th anniversary of Galois' birth) at the Bedlam Theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland.

See also

• Galois theory
• Group theory

References

• Laura Toti Rigatelli, Evariste Galois, Birkhauser, 1996, ISBN 3764354100. This biography challenges the common myth concerning Galois' duel and death.
• Ian Stewart, Galois Theory, Chapman and Hall, 1973, ISBN 0412108003. This comprehensive text on Galois Theory includes a brief biography of Galois himself.
• The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry by Mario Livio, Souvenir Press 2006, ISBN 0-285-63743-6
• Leopold Infeld. Whom the Gods Love: The Story of Evariste Galois. Reston, Va.: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1948. ISBN 0873531256. Classic fictionalized biography by physicist Infeld.
• Jean-Pierre Tignol. Galois's theory of algebraic equations. Singapore: World Scientific, 2001. ISBN 981-02-4541-6. Historical development of Galois theory.

External links

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Évariste Galois", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
• The Galois Archive (biography, letters and texts in various languages)
• Genius and Biographers: The Fictionalization of Evariste Galois by Tony Rothman
• Biography in French
• La vie d'Évariste Galois by Paul Dupuy The first and still one of the most extensive biographies, referred to by every other serious biographer of Galois
• Œuvres Mathématiques published in 1846 in the Journal de Liouville, converted to Djvu format by Prof. Antoine Chambert-Loir at the University of Rennes.
• A short biography on Holistic Numerical Methods Institute
• Alexandre Dumas, Mes Mémoires, the relevant chapter of Alexandre Dumas' memoires where he mentions Galois and the banquet.
• Évariste Galois at Mathematics Genealogy Project.

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1. Stewart, J., et al. Algebra and Trigonometry. p. 334.

• 1811 births
• 1832 deaths
• 19th century mathematicians
• French mathematicians
• Group theorists
• Alumni of the École Normale Supérieure
• Duelling fatalities
• Deaths by firearm
• Lycée Louis-le-Grand alumni