Evariste Galois: The Math Genius Who Died at 20

On the night of May 29, 1832, a 20-year-old French student sat by candlelight, convinced he would die in a duel at dawn. Instead of a will, he furiously scribbled mathematical equations, laying the foundation for an entirely new branch of mathematics in his final hours.This deep dive tells the deeply human story of Evariste Galois: prodigy, political radical, and tragic outsider. We trace how a brilliant mind was repeatedly failed by rigid institutions and a chaotic France, how his father's political suicide and his own imprisonment fueled his rebellion, and how the work he left behind eventually transformed modern algebra, physics, and cryptography.Reading Legendre's geometry like a novel at 14 and mastering Lagrange by 15Two failed Polytechnique exams and lost manuscripts handled by Cauchy, Fourier, and PoissonRadicalization into a Republican artillery unit, a provocative toast, and imprisonmentHow he proved the quintic equation has no general solution by radicals, founding group theoryWhy his papers sat unread for a decade until Liouville published them in 1846