Évariste Galois

Évariste Galois (born October 25, 1811, Bourg-la-Reine, near Paris, France—died May 31, 1832, Paris) was a French mathematician famous for his contributions to the part of higher algebra now known as group theory. His theory provided a solution to the long-standing question of determining when an algebraic equation can be solved by radicals (a solution containing square roots, cube roots, and so on but no trigonometry functions or other nonalgebraic functions).

Galois was the son of Nicolas-Gabriel Galois, an important citizen in the Paris suburb of Bourg-la-Reine. In 1815, during the Hundred Days regime that followed Napoleon’s escape from Elba, his father was elected mayor. Galois was educated at home until 1823, when he entered the Collège Royal de Louis-le-Grand. There his education languished at the hands of mediocre and uninspiring teachers. But his mathematical ability blossomed when he began to study the works of his countrymen Adrien-Marie Legendre on geometry and Joseph-Louis Lagrange on algebra.

Under the guidance of Louis Richard, one of his teachers at Louis-le-Grand, Galois’s further study of algebra led him to take up the question of the solution of algebraic equations. Mathematicians for a long time had used explicit formulas, involving only rational operations and extractions of roots, for the solution of equations up to degree four, but they had been defeated by equations of degree five and higher. In 1770 Lagrange took the novel but decisive step of treating the roots of an equation as objects in their own right and studying permutations (a change in an ordered arrangement) of them. In 1799 the Italian mathematician Paolo Ruffini attempted to prove the impossibility of solving the general quintic equation by radicals. Ruffini’s effort was not wholly successful, but in 1824 the Norwegian mathematician Niels Abel gave a correct proof.

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Galois, stimulated by Lagrange’s ideas and initially unaware of Abel’s work, began searching for the necessary and sufficient conditions under which an algebraic equation of any degree can be solved by radicals. His method was to analyze the “admissible” permutations of the roots of the equation. His key discovery, brilliant and highly imaginative, was that solvability by radicals is possible if and only if the group of automorphisms (functions that take elements of a set to other elements of the set while preserving algebraic operations) is solvable, which means essentially that the group can be broken down into simple “prime-order” constituents that always have an easily understood structure. The term solvable is used because of this connection with solvability by radicals. Thus, Galois perceived that solving equations of the quintic and beyond required a wholly different kind of treatment than that required for quadratic, cubic, and quartic equations. Although Galois used the concept of group and other associated concepts, such as coset and subgroup, he did not actually define these concepts, and he did not construct a rigorous formal theory.

While still at Louis-le-Grand, Galois published one minor paper, but his life was soon overtaken by disappointment and tragedy. A memoir on the solvability of algebraic equations that he had submitted in 1829 to the French Academy of Sciences was lost by Augustin-Louis Cauchy. He failed in two attempts (1827 and 1829) to gain admission to the École Polytechnique, the leading school of French mathematics, his second attempt marred by a disastrous encounter with an oral examiner. Also in 1829 his father, after bitter clashes with conservative elements in his hometown, committed suicide. The same year, Galois enrolled as a student teacher in the less prestigious École Normale Supérieure and turned to political activism. Meanwhile he continued his research, and in the spring of 1830 he had three short articles published. At the same time, he rewrote the paper that had been lost and presented it again to the Academy—but for a second time the manuscript went astray. Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier took it home but died a few weeks later, and the manuscript was never found.

The July Revolution of 1830 sent the last Bourbon monarch, Charles X, into exile. But republicans were deeply disappointed when yet another king, Louis-Philippe, ascended the throne—even though he was the “Citizen King” and wore the tricoloured flag of the French Revolution. When Galois wrote a vigorous article expressing pro-republican views, he was promptly expelled from the École Normale Supérieure. Subsequently, he was arrested twice for republican activities; he was acquitted the first time but spent six months in prison on the second charge. In 1831 he presented his memoir on the theory of equations for the third time to the Academy. This time it was returned but with a negative report. The judges, who included Siméon-Denis Poisson, did not understand what Galois had written and (incorrectly) believed that it contained a significant error. They had been quite unable to accept Galois’s original ideas and revolutionary mathematical methods.

The circumstances that led to Galois’s death in a duel in Paris are not altogether clear, but recent scholarship suggests that it was at his own insistence that the duel was staged and fought to look like a police ambush. In any case, anticipating his death the night before the duel, Galois hastily wrote a scientific last testament addressed to his friend Auguste Chevalier in which he summarized his work and included some new theorems and conjectures.

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Galois’s manuscripts, with annotations by Joseph Liouville, were published in 1846 in the Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées. But it was not until 1870, with the publication of Camille Jordan’s Traité des Substitutions, that group theory became a fully established part of mathematics.