Oddlet: Évariste Galois · 1 min read
Jul 7, 2026
I Have Not The Time
In prison, drunk for the first time, he told his cellmates he would die in a duel over a woman. Nine months later, a woman wrote him a letter.
Évariste Galois failed the entrance exam to the École Polytechnique twice. He was sixteen the first time. The second time, days after his father killed himself, he is said to have thrown an eraser at the examiner. He had already invented group theory and refused to show his work.
Group theory would eventually underwrite quantum mechanics and the encryption protecting this sentence. At the time, it underwrote nothing. The first copy went to Cauchy and went nowhere. Fourier received the next copy, took it home, and died. Poisson read the third and called it neither sufficiently clear nor sufficiently developed.
In between rejections, Galois got himself arrested for raising an open dagger over his wine glass and toasting the king. Alexandre Dumas, who was there, jumped out a window. In prison, drunk for the first time in his life, Galois told his cellmates he would die in a duel over a woman. Nine months later a woman named Stéphanie wrote him a letter, and a man challenged him, and he accepted.
The duel was at dawn. He spent the night before writing out the theory no one had agreed to publish, racing a sunrise he had predicted from a cell. In the margins, beside the proofs he could not finish, he scribbled the same four words again and again.
Je n'ai pas le temps.
I have not the time.
He was twenty.
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- MacTutor History of Mathematics — Galois biography — Detailed academic biography with specific dates for his father's suicide (2 July 1829), Cauchy/Fourier/Poisson submissions, imprisonments, and the marginal 'I do not have the time' note.
- Wikipedia — Évariste Galois — Source for the burial at Montparnasse common grave on 2 June 1832, the quote to his brother Alfred, the dispute over the duel opponent (Pescheux d'Herbinville vs. Ernest Duchatelet), the 29 May 1832 letter to Chevalier, and probable peritonitis as cause of death.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Évariste Galois — Confirms birth/death dates, the failed Polytechnique attempts, mother's family role, lost Fourier manuscript, expulsion from École Normale, and 1846 Liouville publication.
- Encyclopedia.com — Evariste Galois — Documents the 9 May 1831 regicide toast banquet incident and 15 June 1831 acquittal, plus the testamentary letter to Chevalier dated 29 May.
- Bob Gardner — The Bicentennial of Evariste Galois (East Tennessee State University) — Documents duel mechanics (pistols at 25 paces), death from peritonitis at Cochin Hospital around 10 a.m. on 31 May 1832, and the 'cruel coquette' letter excerpt.
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