Évariste Galois
Évariste Galois sits awake in a modest room in Paris on the night of May 29, 1832, knowing that at dawn he will fight a duel he does not expect to survive. The reasons for the fight are unknown — politics, honor, perhaps a personal dispute — but the danger is quite real. He knows better than to pretend otherwise. And so he asks for ink and paper and writes a letter to his friend Auguste Chevalier:
“Je n’ai pas le temps.”
I do not have time.
Writing with urgency, he gathers ideas he has been developing for years, mathematics so advanced that scarcely anyone else could follow them. Among his notes he mentions, almost casually, “I have made some new discoveries in analysis.”
He urges Chevalier to publish what he is sending along if the worst occurs. Évariste ends with:
“Ne pleure pas, Alfred! J’ai besoin de tout mon courage pour mourir à vingt ans!”
Don’t weep, Alfred! I need all my courage to die at twenty!
The worst does occur. By the next morning, Évariste, just twenty years old, will be lying on the ground at the dueling site, shot in the abdomen. He will die the following day.
But in these fading hours before dawn, the ideas Évariste sets down will forever change the history of mathematics.
Évariste had two great loves in his life: politics and math. There may have also been a woman, though that part remains uncertain.