French mathematician who developed new techniques to study the solubility of equations which are now called group theory. Simultaneously with Abel, he showed that the general quintic equation and polynomial equations of higher degree are not soluble in terms of a finite number of rational operations and root extractions.

Galois's life was a tragic one. His father committed suicide. Galois himself regularly failed his exams in school while he concentrated on reading Legendre's Geometry cover to cover. In his examination to the Preparatory School in 1830, the physics teacher Péclet wrote of the young genius "He knows absolutely nothing. I have been told that this student has mathematical ability; this certainly astonishes me. Judging by his examination, he seems of little intelligence, or has hidden his intelligence so well that I found it impossible to detect it" (Infeld 1948, pp. 101-102). Galois also failed to gain admittance to the École Polytechnique not once, but two times. During the first of these examinations, in 1829, Galois was so frustrated by the inane questions that he vented his anger by throwing an eraser at his examiner M. Dinet (Infeld 1948, pp. 99-100).

Galois suffered the additional misfortune of having his work not only ignored, but completely misplaced by its caretakers on several occasions. When Galois gave Cauchy a paper containing his most important results to present (without keeping a copy himself), Cauchy proceeded to lose it (Infeld 1948, pp. 89-90). When Galois submitted a paper for the Académie's prize in math, Fourier took the paper home to peruse, but died shortly thereafter and this paper was also lost. Poisson returned a second paper which contained important results in group theory as incomprehensible.

Galois, always a radical, joined the National Guard, but was subsequently imprisoned in 1831 after proposing a toast interpreted as a threat to the King. On the night before his death in 1832, Galois wrote a letter to his friend Auguste Chevalier, setting forth his discovery of the connection between group theory and the solutions of polynomial equations by radicals (Galois 1959). After writing the letter, Galois was shot to death in his intestine in a gun fight. The exact circumstances of his death are not well established, and various accounts hold that he was shot by a rival in a feud over a woman, that he was challenged by a royalist who objected to his political views, or that he was killed by an agent of the police.



Additional biographies: MacTutor (St. Andrews)















© 1996-2007 Eric W. Weisstein