(I qm assuming this is not too far off topic.)
>From the London Times of December 17, 1998
THE FRENCH MATHEMATICIAN
By Tom Petsinis
Penguin, �7.99 (Fiction)
ISBN 0 140 26472 8
Evariste Galois is the mathematicians' pin-up: he single-handedly rescued
their chalky art from eternal dullness and propelled himself into the realms
of glamorous notoriety. He lived fast and died young. By the time he was
shot in a mysterious duel at the age of 20, Galois had already been
imprisoned for threatening to kill the King in post-revolutionary France and
had invented "Group Theory", an astounding discovery that unifies geometry
and algebra. One hundred and sixty years on, it is now a fundamental part of
modern maths that extends to nuclear physics and genetic engineering.
Few mourned Galois's death. In The French Mathematician, Tom Petsinis
creates a fictional Galois to narrate a novel that tries to explain why the
prodigy was so misunderstood; why as E.T. Bell put it: "In all the history
of science there is no completer example of the triumph of crass stupidity
over untameable genius than is afforded by the all-too-brief life of
Evariste Galois."
Of course, there has to be much fiction in a biography that uses the
Romantic concept of allowing its subject to speak his own mind. From the
little known of Galois between his school reports of "original and queer" to
the desperate last night of his life, when he scribbled to a friend as much
as he could of his insights into mathematics, adding in the margins "I have
not the time", Petsinis has created a Galois who was as brash as he was
brilliant. He rejected anything that did not interest him, including his
mother, women, his schoolwork and, most bravely for the time, God and King.
With the algebraic symbol of "x" Galois writes that mathematicians have both
a cross on which to suffer and angel's wings on which to soar. The book
attempts to end the mystery of a difficult loner who, in a twist to gladden
the hearts of any plodding schoolboy, was rejected by the now-forgotten
mathematical sages of the time on the grounds that he was a no-hoper with
silly ideas.
It is great subject matter, although newcomers to Galois may get a little
lost between fact and fiction, detail and dreams. For while Petsinis creates
a lively and convincing portrait, he peppers Galois's life with lengthy and
obscure hallucinations, as well as a peculiar habit of talking to his
biographer. After reading this version of the life of Galois, one can
imagine all too well why the teenage genius had few friends and fewer patrons.
Reviewed by HELEN RUMBELOW for the London Times
