The Night Before

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Evariste Galois died at twenty, on 31 May 1832, of a wound from a duel fought the previous morning; historians still disagree about who his opponent was and what the quarrel was actually about, with theories running from a political conflict of the turbulent post-1830 republican underground he had been jailed for supporting, to a private affair of the heart. The romantic version of the story, repeated for generations, has him staying up the whole night before the duel frantically writing down his mathematical results in case he did not survive, annotating a manuscript with the margin note "I have not time." Later historians of mathematics have found that account overstated: Galois had already submitted much of the relevant work to the Academie des Sciences years earlier, only to have it lost or rejected by referees including Cauchy and Poisson, so the final night was less a first draft of genius under pressure than a last attempt to make sure ideas already refused a hearing would not vanish with him. Either way, the manuscripts survived, in the hands of his brother Alfred, and Joseph Liouville edited and published them fourteen years later, in 1846, giving the mathematical world access to a theory that a young man's death had nearly cost it entirely.