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by rpmw 678 days ago
I will always remember Galois theory as the punchline to my Abstract Algebra courses in college. Galois was a brilliant math mind, and I'm curious what else he would have contributed had he not died at 20 in a duel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89variste_Galois

2 comments

Great to see this course material public. It's a real missed opportunity though to not mention that Galois wrote a lot of it down staying up all night before being shot.
That's a common myth. See this paper referenced in the wikipedia article:

Rothman, Tony (1982). "Genius and Biographers: The Fictionalization of Evariste Galois". The American Mathematical Monthly. 89 (2): 84–106. doi:10.2307/2320923. JSTOR 2320923

Quite the clickbait. You can only access it from the pay site, or unless you can get a school library to access it, which I will do. Only the first page is available free.
Or you can paste the following JSTOR link into sci-hub.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2320923

I'd be genuinely curious to have a chat with similar minded people. They must see the world quite differently to be able to fork a new path in hard maths mostly on their own ..