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Comment by kdamica | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: Evariste Galois made major contributions to math in his teens, before dying in a duel at age 20.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89variste_Galois

Wikipedia reminds me that the version of his death (staying up all night before the duel to frantically write down his mathematical ideas at the last possible moment) that I read in Men of Mathematics may have been overdramatized, apparently like a number of the stories in that book.

What definitely did happen is that Galois was worried that he might not win the duel and that he might never get the chance to redeem himself in front of his mathematical peers. We know this because of the letter he wrote before he died; we actually have it, and WP has a scan of a page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:E._Galois_Letter.jpg

It is hard to overdramatize the events of Galois' life. He lived during a revolution, he went out into the streets to protest and fight, he was arrested multiple times for his outrageous political speech, and he laid down his life for his political beliefs. A friend of mine who survived a chronic and often-fatal disease in his teens used to quip, "Well, if I were Galois, I'd have already made my best contributions and died by now." Galois indeed burned fast and bright.

Tony Rothman wrote an article in the American Mathematical Monthly which helped to separate a lot of the fact from the fiction in accounts of Galois's life. Highly recommended:

https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/2...

He was also a political firebrand at the time and did much of his writing in prison as a result.

That's fantastic. Not him dying, but you're not likely to hear a story like that these days.

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