Galois, �variste 1811-32
French mathematician

Born in Bourg-la-Reine, he entered the �cole Normale Sup�rieure in 1829, but was expelled in 1830 due to his extreme Republican sympathies. He was politically active and was imprisoned twice. His mathematical reputation rests on fewer than 100 pages of work of original genius, which include a memoir on the solubility of equations by radicals, and a mathematical testament giving the essentials of his discoveries on the theory of algebraic equations and Abelian integrals. Some of his results had been independently obtained by Niels Henrik Abel, but Galois put them in a theoretical setting for them which proved to be very useful to later mathematicians. The brevity and obscurity of his writing delayed the understanding of his work, but it gradually came to be seen as a cornerstone of modern algebra, in which the concept of a group first became of central importance.