On the night of May 29, 1832, a 20-year-old French student sat by candlelight, convinced he would die in a duel at dawn. Instead of a will, he furiously scribbled mathematical equations, laying the foundation for an entirely new branch of mathematics in his final hours.

This deep dive tells the deeply human story of Evariste Galois: prodigy, political radical, and tragic outsider. We trace how a brilliant mind was repeatedly failed by rigid institutions and a chaotic France, how his father's political suicide and his own imprisonment fueled his rebellion, and how the work he left behind eventually transformed modern algebra, physics, and cryptography.

• Reading Legendre's geometry like a novel at 14 and mastering Lagrange by 15
• Two failed Polytechnique exams and lost manuscripts handled by Cauchy, Fourier, and Poisson
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