Évariste Galois and the social time of mathematics
The thrust of this article is to offer a new approach to the study of Galois’s Mémoire sur les conditions de résolubilité des équations par radicaux. Drawing on methodology developed by social and cultural historians, it contextualizes Galois’s work by situating it in the parisian mathematical milieu of the 1820s and 1830s. By reconstructing the social process whereby a young man became an established mathematician at the time, this article shows that Galois’s trajectory was far from unusual, and...