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The fact that the tragic story of Évariste Galois, the mathematical genius who burned brightly but all too briefly, is not as unusual as one might think among mathematicians of his and subsequent generations. It is, rather, the most famous and dramatic of an entire genre of mathematical stories that originated in the early decades of the nineteenth century but is still going strong today. Consider, for example... Niels Henrik Abel.. János Bolyai... Srinivasa Ramanujan... John Nash... Kurt Gödel... Alexander Grothendieck... Grigory Perelman... Among modern mathematicians, it seems, extreme eccentricity, mental illness, and even solitary death are not a matter of random misfortune. They are, rather... reserved only for the most outstanding members of the field. (en) |
