ARTICLE: Maths + Angry Boys = Les Misérables

One thing I really like about having started all of this, is that friends now say, ‘have you heard about x, it would make a great substack article.’ That said, when my math-nerd friend Matt claimed he had an entertaining piece of maths history I could cover, I was sceptical. The moral of the story is trust Matt, because by the end of it, he had proved that Maths could be entertaining, we had somehow ended up quoting Alexandre Dumas, ended up in the midst of Les Misérables and had reaffirmed that French people are basically bonkers. Je t'aime mais tu sais que c'est la vérité…

For this story, we need to start in 1811, in Paris’s southern suburbs, where a precocious child named Évariste was born four years before the Battle of Waterloo. His father Nicolas was a Republican, and was in charge of the local liberal party.

The departure of Napoleon had good connotations for Évariste Galois’s family. When Louis XVIII came to the throne, his father became the local mayor in Bourg-la-Reine. Whilst he was doing all of this, Évariste’s mother Adélaide was taking his education in hand. She was eminently qualified. The daughter of a legal scholar, she could read Latin fluently and devoured classical literature for fun.

At 12, Évariste went to school, where quickly his teacher, an unpublished mathematician named Louis Paul Émile Richard, realised that he had a prodigy on his hands. Unfortunately, ego got the better of the young pupil. On the one hand, he was reading books aimed at professional mathematics, rinsing through Éléments de Géométrie by Adrien-Marie Legendre with ease, and going through the original papers of the famed Joseph-Louis Lagrange. On the other, however, he put little effort into his schoolwork and exhibited a smug attitude for someone whose output was unimpressive.

Adrien-Marie Legendre. I’ve included this picture by Julien-Léopold Boilly because it’s hilarious and exactly what I think a Maths genius should look like.

---

In 1828, Galois tried to get into the École Polytechnique, the most prestigious maths institution in France, and failed. From there, he began publishing papers. He had already begun making strides in studying polynomial equations, and he put two articles in on this with the Academy of Sciences. The man that reviewed them, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, rejected them. He was not only eminent mathematician, but an engineer and a physicist, so he was far from thick but the chances are that his reasons were a combination of Galois’s inexperience at writing things up properly, and Cauchy not understanding what he was looking at. Because the breakthroughs that Évariste was making had begun making were incredible, but nobody was noticing it. Yet.