Genius and Biographers: The Fictionalization of Evariste Galois

Summary

1 Introduction

In Paris, on the obscure morning of May 30, 1832, near a pond not far from the pension Sieur Faultrier, Evariste Galois confronted Pescheux d'Herbinville in a duel to be fought with pistols, and was shot through the stomach. Hours later, lying wounded and alone, Galois was found by a passing peasant. He was taken to the Hospital Cochin where he died the following day in the arms of his brother Alfred, after having refused the services of a priest. Had Galois lived another five months, until October 25, he would have attained the age of twenty-one.

The legend of Evariste Galois, creator of group theory, has fired the imagination of generations of mathematics students. Many of us have experienced the excitement of Freeman Dyson who writes ([8], p. 14):

In those days, my head was full of the romantic prose of E. T. Bell's Men of Mathematics, a collection of biographies of the great mathematicians. This is a splendid book for a young boy to read (unfortunately, there is not much in it to inspire a girl, with Sonya Kovalevsky allotted only half a chapter), and it has awakenedmany people of my generation to the beauties of mathematics. The most memorable chapter is called “Genius and Stupidity” and describes the life and death of the French mathematician Galois, who was killed in a duel at the age of twenty.

Dyson goes on to quote Bell's famous description ([1], p. 375) of Galois's last night before the duel: