Evarist

Évariste Galois was bon in 25 October 1811 on Bourg-La- Reine on France.
Nicolas-Gabriel Galois and Adélaïde-Marie were his parents. His father was a Republican and was head of Bourg-la-Reine's liberal party. He became mayor of the village after Louis XVIII returned to the throne in 1814. His mother, the daughter of a jurist, was a fluent reader of Latin and classical literature and wasresponsible for her son's education for his first twelve years. At the age of 10, Galois was offered a place at the college of Reims, but his mother preferred to keep him at home.
In October 1823, he entered the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and despite some turmoil in the school at the beginning of the term, Galois managed to perform well for the first two years, obtaining the first prize in Latin. He soonbecame bored with his studies and, at the age of 14, he began to take a serious interest in mathematics.
He found a copy of Adrien Marie Legendre's Éléments de Géométrie, which it is said that he read "like a novel" and mastered at the first reading. At 15, he was reading the original papers of Joseph Louis Lagrange, such as the landmark Réflexions sur la résolution algébrique des équations whichlikely motivated his later work on equation theory, and Leçons sur le calcul des fonctions, work intended for professional mathematicians, yet his classwork remained uninspired, and his teachers accused him of affecting ambition and originality in a negative way.
In 1828, he attempted the entrance examination for the École Polytechnique, the most prestigious institution for mathematics in France atthe time, without the usual preparation in mathematics, and failed for lack of explanations on the oral examination. In that same year, he entered the École Normale (then known as l'École préparatoire), a far inferior institution for mathematical studies at that time, where he found some professors sympathetic to him.
In the following year Galois's first paper, on continued fractions waspublished. It was at around the same time that he began making fundamental discoveries in the theory of polynomial equations. He submitted two papers on this topic to the Academy of Sciences. Augustin Louis Cauchy refereed these papers, but refused to accept them for publication for reasons that still remain unclear. However, in spite of many claims to the contrary, it is widely held that Cauchyrecognized the importance of Galois' work, and that he merely suggested combining the two papers into one in order to enter it in the competition for the Academy's Grand Prize in Mathematics. Cauchy, an eminent mathematician of the time, considered Galois' work to be a likely winner.
On 28 July 1829 Galois's father committed suicide after a bitter political dispute with the village priest. A couple ofdays later, Galois made his second and last attempt to enter the Polytechnique, and failed yet again. It is undisputed that Galois was more than qualified; however, accounts differ on why he failed. The legend holds that he thought the exercise proposed to him by the examiner to be of no interest, and, in exasperation, threw the rag used to clean the blackboard at the examiner's head. More plausibleaccounts state that Galois made too many logical leaps and baffled the incompetent examiner, which enraged Galois. The recent death of his father may have also influenced his behavior.
Having been denied admission to the Polytechnique, Galois took the Baccalaureate examinations in order to enter the École Normale. He passed, receiving his degree on 29 December 1829. His examiner in mathematicsreported, "This pupil is sometimes obscure in expressing his ideas, but he is intelligent and shows a remarkable spirit of research."
He submitted his memoir on equation theory several times, but it was never published in his lifetime due to various events. As noted before, his first attempt was refused by Cauchy, but in February 1830 following Cauchy's suggestion he submitted it to the Academy's...