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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