Evrariste Galois: Born October 25, 1811

Died: May 31, 1832

     Evarsite Galois was a great mathematician who contributed significantly to the subject of mathematics.  He lived through some great times   for his country like when Napoleon was at his peak of power. Galois grew up in Paris, France and lived there his whole life.  Marin Mersenne also   In his first run of school he did really well and won a lot of prizes and awards, but then he got bored and started to become a big pest.  The teachers wrote notes about him being a pest but also being a genius.  They said he is wasting his time at school and that he should just study the one subject that dominates all of his interests, which was Mathematics.

      So Galois started to take some serious math classes with good mathematicians.  At ages 16-17 he applied to the top university around, Ecole Polytechnique, and got rejected twice. A mathematician who did get into this school was Jules Henri Poincare. He made it in only because of his wonderful math skills, because he was a terrible artist. Part of the reason why Galois didn't make it in was that he was not good at communicating his deep mathematical ideas, and did a lot of work in his head.  Also the second time he applied it was not too long after his dad committed suicide which he was greatly affected by. After being rejected twice from Ecole Polytechnique, he went to Ecole Normale.  Another person that went to school in France was Marin Mersenne.  Later in Galois's life he got thrown in jail for 6 months for apparently threatening to overthrow the government with others and making threats against the king.  Once he got out he had his one and only love affair and was disgusted with the whole thing.  A few days later he ran into some public enemies and had a question of honor, so he got himself into a duel and got killed at age 20.  The night of the duel he knew he didn't stand much of a chance so he stayed up most of the night writing down all of his work so it wasn't lost with him.  Later his work was looked over and some gaps were filled in by Joseph Liouville and the work was great.  In his work the group theory was discovered now known as the Galois theory.  Karen Uhlenbeck also was interested and studied Algebra.

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Galois.html

http://scidiv.bcc.ctc.edu/MATH/Galois.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline-of-invention