Evariste Galois French mathematician Date of Birth: 26.10.1811 Country: France

Biography of Évariste Galois

Évariste Galois was a French mathematician who lived from 1811 to 1832. He was born on October 26, 1811, in the town of Bourg-la-Reine near Paris. Galois began his education at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris in 1823 after receiving thorough instruction at home from his mother.

At a young age, Galois showed promise in mathematics and published his first work on periodic continued fractions in 1828 while still a student at the Lycée. He aspired to attend the École Polytechnique but failed the entrance exam twice, attributing his failure to the juvenile nature of the questions posed to him.

In 1830, Galois was admitted to the École Normale, but he was ultimately expelled in 1831 for his "unacceptable behavior" and perceived arrogance. Galois was particularly involved in revolutionary activities and eventually found himself imprisoned for several months. His tumultuous life came to an end in May 1832 when he was killed in a duel, which was instigated by a romantic dispute.

Shortly before the duel, Galois wrote a summary of his discoveries and entrusted it to a friend, with the request to inform leading mathematicians about them. The note concluded with the words, "You will publicly request Jacobi or Gauss to provide an opinion not on the fairness, but on the significance of these theorems. After that, I hope there will be people who deem it necessary to decipher this entire confusion." Unfortunately, Galois' letter did not reach either Jacobi or Gauss.

It was not until 1846, when Liouville published a significant portion of Galois' work in his journal, that the mathematical community became aware of Galois' contributions. These works, which amounted to only 60 pages of small format, encompassed the theory of groups – the key to modern algebra and geometry. They also included the first classification of irrationalities determined by algebraic equations, now known as Galois theory, as well as problems related to abelian integrals.

Galois' theory shed light on age-old questions such as angle trisection, cube duplication, and the solutions of cubic, biquadratic, and higher-degree equations in radicals. He established conditions for reducing the solutions of such equations to solutions of systems of lower-degree algebraic equations.