Évariste Galois

Evariste Galois, a French mathematician, is eighteen years-old in 1829 when he publishes his first paper on continued fractions, which, although competent, holds no suggestion of genius.

Nevertheless, it is at around the same time that he begins making fundamental discoveries in the theory of polynomial equations, and he submits two papers on this topic to the Academy of Sciences.

Augustin Louis Cauchy referees these papers, who, despite many claims to the contrary, appears to have recognized the importance of Galois' work, but refuses to accept them for publication for reasons that still remain unclear, though it is speculated that he preferred Galois to combine the two manuscripts into a single, more comprehensive paper.

In any case, Galois is able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a long-standing problem.

Évariste Galois had soon followed his initial paper with one dealing with the impossibility of solving the general quintic (fifth-degree) equation by algebraic means alone; his work lays the fundamental foundations for Galois theory, a major branch of abstract algebra, and the subfield of Galois connections.

He is the first to use the word "group" (French: groupe) as a technical term in mathematics to represent a group of permutations.

While their counterparts at Polytechnique were making history in the streets during the les Trois Glorieuses, Galois and all the other students at the École Normale had been locked in by the school's director.

Galois, incensed, writes a blistering letter criticizing the director that he submits to the Gazette des Écoles, signing the letter with his full name.

Despite the fact that the Gazette's editor redacts the signature for publication, Galois is, predictably, expelled for it.

Evariste Galois, whose contributions to several branches of mathematics, including group theory, number theory, and algebra, is killed in a duel at the age of twenty on May 31, 1832.