Footnote:

Commenting on Bell's description of Galois' life, Keith Devlin has stressed the same kind of over-dramatizations that I want to point out here. Devlin wrote:

Killed in a duel at the tender age of twenty, the final hours of this undoubted mathematical genius were described in the following breathless prose by the mathematician Eric Temple Bell in his book "Men of Mathematics", first published in 1937:

"All night long he had spent the fleeting hours feverishly dashing off his scientific last will and testament, writing against time to glean a few of the great things in his teeming mind before the death he saw could overtake him. Time after time he broke off to scribble in the margin "I have not time; I have not time," and passed on to the next frantically scrawled outline. What he wrote in those last desperate hours before the dawn will keep generations of mathematicians busy for hundreds of years. He had found, once and for all, the true solution of a riddle which had tormented mathematicians for centuries: under what circumstances can an equation be solved?"

It's a great story. The stuff of legends. Which one of us, when we were starting out on our mathematical careers, on hearing the story for the first time--or perhaps reading Bell's words for ourselves--did not find our emotions stirred? The more so if we took into account the tragic details of the short life that preceded the young Frenchman's violent end. At least, the details as described to us by Bell, who tells us how this young genius suffered the frustrations of his work being shunned by a mathematical establishment that was too stupid to see true genius when it was presented to them.

The facts, sadly to say, do not support this romantic picture--not that anything as mundane as hard fact will stop a good story once it gets going.

Calculating the Limits of Poetic License:
Fictional Narrative and the History of Mathematics
Leo Corry - Tel Aviv University