✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Taste in Math - Colossus

joincolossus.com · 2,965 words · saved by 2 readers

In post-Napoleonic France, there lived a boy called Évariste Galois, who saw something beautiful and fundamental no one else had yet articulated. But as he came of age, his life unraveled. In 1829, when Galois was 18, his father committed suicide. The following year, he was expelled from the École normale supérieure for political insubordination. Later in 1830, on Bastille Day, during the July Revolution, he was arrested and sent to prison, where he continued to work on math through depression and desperation. Galois was released in the spring of 1831; one month later, he was killed in a duel. He was 20. The night before the duel, Galois wrote 60 feverish pages of mathematical notes to his friend Auguste Chevalier. His parting words pleaded that the trusted mathematicians of his day would “give their opinion, not as to the truth, but as to the importance of these theorems. Later there will be, I hope, some people who will find it to their advantage to decipher all this mess.” Galois’ l

Taste in Math - Colossus Loading Search Podcasts Invest Like the Best Business Breakdowns Founder’s Field Guide Joys of Compounding Founders 50X Magazine Newsletter About Us Sponsors Subscribe Log in Copyright © 2026 Colossus. All rights reserved. Essay Taste in Math How a boy's dying wish launched a 150-year quest to map all the patterns in the universe By Terran Mott October 2025 Issue 04 Évariste Galois, aged about 15 Subscribe to print for your office or home. The best story about math is: In post-Napoleonic France, there lived a boy called Évariste Galois, who saw something bea

Explore this link on the map →

saved by

related reading