The Apocalypse According to Galois

On the night of 29 May 1832, in Paris, Évariste Galois, twenty years old, writes a letter to his friend Auguste Chevalier: he is to fight a duel at dawn and senses he will not come back. The pages he leaves behind, long illegible and then slowly understood, contain the outline of a new language — the language of symmetries — destined to reveal the deep unity of mathematics. This book tells what was in those pages, and what two centuries have done to understand them.

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