Évariste Galois (gælˈwɑː; evaʁist ɡalwa; 25 October 1811 – 31 May 1832) was a French mathematician and political activist. While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a problem that had been open for 350 years. His work laid the foundations for Galois theory and group theory, two major branches of abstract algebra. He was a staunch republican and was heavily involved in the political turmoil that surrounded the French Revolution of 1830. As a result of his political activism, he was arrested repeatedly, serving one jail sentence of several months. For reasons that remain obscure, shortly after his release from prison he fought in a duel and died of the wounds he suffered. Galois was born on 25 October 1811 to Nicolas-Gabriel Galois and Adélaïde-Marie (née Demante). His father was a Republican and was head of Bourg-la-Reine's liberal party. His father became mayor of the village after Louis XVIII returned to the throne in 1814. His mother, the daughter of a jurist, was a fluent reader of Latin and classical literature and was responsible for her son's education for his first twelve years. In October 1823, he entered the Lycée Louis-le-Grand where his teacher Louis Paul Émile Richard recognized his brilliance. At the age of 14, he began to take a serious interest in mathematics. He found a copy of Adrien-Marie Legendre's Éléments de Géométrie, which, it is said, he read "like a novel" and mastered at the first reading. At 15, he was reading the original papers of Joseph-Louis Lagrange, such as the Réflexions sur la résolution algébrique des équations which likely motivated his later work on equation theory, and Leçons sur le calcul des fonctions, work intended for professional mathematicians, yet his classwork remained uninspired and his teachers accused him of putting on the airs of a genius.

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Galois theory
In mathematics, Galois theory, originally introduced by Évariste Galois, provides a connection between field theory and group theory. This connection, the fundamental theorem of Galois theory, allows reducing certain problems in field theory to group theory, which makes them simpler and easier to understand. Galois introduced the subject for studying roots of polynomials.
Field (mathematics)
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Group (mathematics)
In mathematics, a group is a non-empty set with an operation that satisfies the following constraints: the operation is associative, has an identity element, and every element of the set has an inverse element. Many mathematical structures are groups endowed with other properties. For example, the integers with the addition operation is an infinite group, which is generated by a single element called 1 (these properties characterize the integers in a unique way).
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