nybe on Nostr: Mathematics, notes and the power of being caught under a deadline: “Among the ...

Mathematics, notes and the power of being caught under a deadline:

“Among the thousands of stories of great insights and discoveries, per-
haps the strangest one of all is that of Evariste Galois, a promising student
of mathematics in France who in his teens revealed exceptional brilliance
in algebra. In 1831, at the age of twenty, he became embroiled in a quarrel
over a woman, which resulted in his being challenged to a duel. The night
before the duel, certain he was going to die, Galois sat down and tried to
summarize all of the ideas on algebraic equations that had been troubling
him for several years. Suddenly, the ideas flowed, and even new ones came
to him. He wrote all night at a feverish pitch. The next day, as he had fore-
seen, he died in the duel, but in the ensuing years his notes were read and
published, leading to a complete revolution in higher algebra. Some of his
scribbled notes indicated directions in mathematics that were so far ahead
of his time, it is hard to fathom where they came from.”