Bill Humphries (bill@whump.com) wrote:
>I've always thought of Galois -- who, according to legend, wrote up his
>notes on finite groups the night before he died in a duel -- as a martyr.
>
>According to this article from The Hindu the duel was fought over a
>matter of politics.
Yes in fact Evariste Galois was politically quite a radical.
Ironically one of his main mathematical results, improving earlier
work by Abel, was that many polynomial equations cannot be solved by
radicals.
Ba-da-boom!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:14:43 PDT