The Revolutions of Évariste Galois: Professor Marcus du Sautoy (1831)
In this episode of Travels Through Time, Marcus du Sautoy The Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford takes us back to the 1830s to meet one of his heroes: the brilliant and tragic Évariste Galois.
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Évariste Galois is a fascinating figure in the history of mathematics. An unpromising and secretive student who became embroiled in the revolutionary politics of the 1830s, Galois was dead at the age of twenty. Yet the work he completed in his few active years of study has influenced the subject of mathematics ever since.
Galois was born on the outskirts of Paris during the period of Napoleon’s rule in 1811. From the beginning he was known for his unusual, ‘bizarre’, character that led him into successive dangerous situations.
“There is nothing in his work except strange fantasies and negligence; he always does what he should not do. He gets worse every day. He has gone from one punishment to another. His ambition, his frequently ostentatious originality, his bizarre character keep him isolated from his school fellows.”
At some point during Galois’s undistinguished school career he fell, ‘under the spell of the excitement of mathematics’. Here he found a realm of certainty and fascination, where he could feel safe and escape the perils of human interaction and everyday life.
During his teenage years Galois’s fascination for his subject grew ever deeper. He began to conceive entirely new ways of approaching an age-old mathematical problem – that of solving the quintic. He wrote his ideas down in a document which he handed into the premier academic institution in the land: the Academy of Sciences. Unfortunately, the Professor of Mathematics died soon after, and Galois’ manuscript was lost. But he didn’t give up; he wrote a new paper and handed it in again. Incredibly, this manuscript was lost and Galois was left waiting, increasingly angry and frustrated, for a response that never came.
These personal struggles are intricately bound with the turbulent political scene of post-revolutionary France. The dramatic events of the previous half century had left the country divided into royalists (Ultras) and republicans.
In 1831 feelings were running high, especially on the streets of Paris where barricades and violence were never far away. For Galois, young, reckless and desperate to make his mark on society, the revolutionary movement provided him with a focus for his energy – and put him on course to a tragic end.
In this episode Marcus takes Galois’s story to its dramatic conclusion over the course of twelve months between May 1831 and May 1832.
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Marcus du Sautoy is one of the UK’s leading academics. During an illustrious career he has written many articles and several best-selling books, made a wide range of TV and radio programmes and been hugely influential in popularising mathematics in all its forms.
Click here to order Marcus du Sautoy’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
Listen to the episode here
Show notes
Scene One: 9 May 1831, Paris. At a banquet to celebrate the acquittal of 19 members of the revolutionary Société des Amis du Peuple, a young Galois gets carried away by the atmosphere and the alcohol.
Scene Two: 23 October 1831 , Sainte-Pelagie Prison, southern Paris. Galois is thrown in jail, having been found guilty of wearing a banned National Guard uniform, carrying weapons – and graffitiing his holding cell with political cartoons.
Scene Three: 30 May 1832, Paris: Early one morning a peasant on his way to work finds a young man lying beside a pond bleeding from a gunshot wound.
People
Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Marcus du Sautoy
Producer: Maria Nolan
Editorial: Artemis Irvine
Titles: Jon O
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Images
Évariste Galois, in his mid-teens
Galois lived just in the pre-photographic age. Here is one of the very few visual representations of him. Source: WikiCommons.
In this episode you will learn:
About politics in early nineteenth century France
How the intellectual world functioned at this time
About creativity in mathematical thought
What it was like to be a young revolutionary in 1830s Paris
About the continuing legacy of Galois’s work in the twenty-first century
And about mathematics in the plays of William Shakespeare
A street scene in revolutionary Paris, 1830s, showing the interplay of politics and science
Image credit; Wellcome Collection
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Click here to order The Creativity Code by Marcus du Sautoy from our friends at John Sandoe’s Books.
Episode thumbnail image credit: The Wellcome Trust