Evariste Galois

Evariste Galois was a French mathematician who, despite dying at twenty years old, founded what is now called Galois theory, a body of work connecting the study of polynomial equations to the abstract algebraic structure now known as a group. Galois showed that whether a polynomial equation can be solved using a formula involving only radicals, such as square roots and cube roots, depends on the structure of a particular group of symmetries associated with the equation's roots, finally resolving a problem mathematicians had worked on for centuries and explaining why no general radical formula exists for solving fifth-degree and higher equations. His mathematical papers were largely rejected or overlooked by prominent mathematicians of his time and were not properly understood and published until years after his death. Galois died in 1832 from wounds suffered in a duel, and the theory bearing his name, developed while he was a teenager and young man on the margins of the French mathematical establishment, became one of the central organizing frameworks of modern abstract algebra.