Fermat's Enigma

by Simon Singh

Last year before March 1st, Monsieur Galois gave to the secretary of the Institute a memoir on the solution of numerical equations. This memoir should have been entered in the competition for the Grand Prize in Mathematics. It deserved the prize, for it could resolve some difficulties that Lagrange had failed to do. Monsieur Cauchy had conferred the highest praise on the author about this subject. And what happened? The memoir is lost and the prize is given without the participation of the young savant. Le Globe, 1831 Galois felt that his memoir had been deliberately lost by a politically biased Academy, a belief that was reinforced a year later when the Academy rejected his next manuscript, claiming that “his argument is neither sufficiently clear nor sufficiently developed to allow us to judge its rigor.” He decided that there was a conspiracy to exclude him from the mathematical community, and as a result he neglected his research in favor of fighting for the republican cause.