This is damn interesting. Headphones recommend it.

Paris, 29th of May, 1832. All through the night, a young Frenchman named Everest Galois,

stayed awake, quill in hand, frantically scrolling notes and equations

across dozens of sheets of paper. He had only been studying mathematics seriously for a few years,

but he had proven to be a veritable prodigy. After quickly exhausting the knowledge of his teachers,

he'd branched out into his own research, extraordinarily prescient.

By all rights, Galois ought to have been lauded and laureled by the scientific community for his

work. Above all, he should have been recognized and rewarded by France's prestigious Academy of

Sciences. But Galois, at least by his own reckoning, had received little but dismissal

from the mathematics community. Now, he sat feverishly scribbling a letter to his best friend,

trying to commit as many of his recent ideas to paper as possible. Finally, in the wee hours of the

morning, Galois had sketched out most of what he felt able to capture.

You know that these aren't the only subjects I've explored, he wrote.

But I don't have time.

20-year-old Galois fully expected that he was about to be shot to death.

Everest Galois was born on the 25th of October 1811 in the town of Bourgleran, today part of the southern suburbs of Paris. Although his parents ran a well-regarded boarding school of their own, they sent young Everis to study in Paris, shortly before he turned 12,

to improve his social opportunities.

Galois New School, the Collège Royal de Louis Le Grande, was and remains prestigious.

But in the early 19th century, it boasted not only an unparalleled list of alumni,

among them such luminaries as Voltaire and Charles

Marie de la Condamine, but also a fearsomely draconian atmosphere. Meals were meager, facilities

failing, cold constant, rats regular, and punishments painful, with the students under constant surveillance.

...