Today, let's tell the remarkable tale of Evariste
Galois. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Evariste Galois was the
father of modern algebra. He was born in France in
1811, and died of gunshot wounds twenty years and
seven months later. He was still a minor when his
brief, turbulent life ended.
Galois began his career in math by failing the
Polytechnique's entry exam twice because
his answers were so odd. He was accepted into the
École Normale, only to be expelled
when he attacked the director in a letter to the
papers. A few months later, he was arrested for
making a threatening speech against the king.
He was acquitted, but then he was right back into
jail after he illegally wore a uniform and carried
weapons. He spent the next nine months writing
mathematics. Then, as soon as he got out, he was
devastated by an unhappy love affair. I guess it'd
be fair to say he was typical bright young
teenager. Still, his talents as a mathematician
were known. He did publish some material, and
luminaries like Gauss, Jacobi, Fourier, and Cauchy
all knew of him.
For some murky reason - most likely underhanded
police work - he was challenged to a duel on May
30th, 1832. It was a duel he couldn't win but which
he couldn't dodge, either. On May 29th, he wrote
and wrote. That day and night he gathered the
hundred or so pages of mathematics he'd produced
during his short life. He wrote a long cover letter
organizing explaining and expanding upon the work.
Then and there, he set down what proved to be the
very foundations of modern algebra and group
theory. Some of the theorems in that package
weren't proved for a century. He faced death with a
cool desperation, reaching down inside himself and
getting at truths we do not know how he found.
His fright and arrogance were mixed. The letter was
peppered with asides. He wrote: "I do not say to
anyone that I owe to his counsel or ...
encouragement [what] is good in this work." But he
also, desperately, penned in the margins, "I have
When poet Carol Drake heard his story, she wrote
about it in two voices. The first voice is
Galois's. He says, Until the sun I have no
time. And the second voice replies,
But the flash of thought is like the sun
Watch at the desk, through the window raised on
the flawless dark,
the hand that trembles in the light,
Until the sun
I have no time, ...
I cry to you I have no time -
Watch. This light is like the sun
Illumining grass, seacoast, this death --
I have no time. Be thou my time.
Well, the next morning Galois was shot. Two days
later he was dead. But he'd done more for his world
in one night than most of us will do in a lifetime
because he knew he could find something in that
singular moment when he really had to look inside
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds