Evariste Galois who are you?

The mathematician Evariste Galois had a strange fate.

The man was born on October 25, 1811 and died 20 years later following a duel, just after he had finished writing theorems that would change the world of mathematics.

“Could do better, inconsistent results.”

The young Galois's report cards have not been found, but we can tell you that the future mathematician was far from being a perfect student. However, everything started off rather well for him: he entered the fourth grade at the Collège Royal Louis-le-Grand at the age of 12. He quickly won several prizes for his results in Greek and Latin, but slowly weariness set in and the student Galois dropped out and ended up repeating a year. Evariste Galois would not get his baccalaureate and yet...

Love at first sight.

It was around 1827 that the young man literally fell in love with mathematics. His literature teachers saw him as a future mathematician, but this was not the case for his mathematics teacher, who criticized him for a lack of method. The years that followed initially proved the math teacher right: Evariste Galois tried twice to enter the polytechnic, but nothing worked and he was rejected twice.

A man of scandals.

The mathematician is a bit of a provocateur and in the midst of the turmoil of the 1830s following the Three Glorious Days, during a well-watered banquet the man makes a toast while brandishing a knife threatening the king. He is imprisoned the next day. His one-year sentence barely completed when Galois is challenged to a duel. He will die from a bullet piercing his abdomen.

A surprising testament.

The day before his duel, the man wrote several letters, including one to Auguste Chevalier in which he set out several of his theorems. The letter was published according to the wishes of the late mathematician in La Revue encyclopédiqu e in September 1832; the theorems it contained were illuminating: they concerned the resolution of equations and are now taught in mathematics degrees.