Today, I will fight in a duel, and I will lose.
The horizon on the east already shows the hint of dawn, the last dawn I will see. I blow out the candle; I have written down almost all of my discoveries in the past few nights, and now I should rest. Jacobi and Gauss will understand my proof of the insolvability of a quantic by radicals. But will they see what I see, a new mathematical method that hides within my proof?
I often imagine what Évariste Galois, a brilliant mathematician who died at twenty in a duel he knew he could not win, thought in his last hours.
My mind wanders back to my night of discovery, when just as my eyelids grew heavy, I saw symbols dance in a circle on my scratch paper, and it struck me that I could study this dance. When I treated the roots of a polynomial as permutable objects and examined the structure of their permutation group, I found the link between this dance of roots and the solvability of the polynomial. But there remains so much more to be discovered; if only I had more time.
I worked on my first math research project in seventh grade. A friend and I had hypothesized an identity, and our numerical results agreed, but we’d been unable to prove it for nearly two months. Then, during a math test, I used an algebraic identity in combination with mathematical induction to solve a problem, and it occurred to me that the same method could be applied to prove our hypothesis. I immediately forgot about the test and poured my ideas onto the scratch papers. As I left the classroom, there was a smile on my face, which my classmates assumed was because of the test; in truth, it was a smile from the joy and pride of discovering something no one has before.
Despite my fatigue, sleep eludes me. As a child, I often laid awake at night, afraid to go into that nothingness of oblivion. But when numbers and symbols called to me, I would forget that fear. I have been given a talent in mathematics, whether by divine power or by probability, and I feel a responsibility to share my mathematical ideas with the world, just as it is my responsibility as a citizen of France to fight the royalists.
Unlike Galois, I have not found a cause to die for this early in life. But having also been given an aptitude and passion for math, I feel responsible to use it to better the world, to stand upon the shoulders of the giants and strive to reach a little higher. In the years ahead, I want to not only explore math but also inspire others to see its beauty. To see something light up in the eyes of younger versions of myself, to see in them the same dream, provides as great a joy as that of discovery.
I’ll never know if I’ll be remembered as a mathematician or just a crazy republican who died in a duel. But there is no turning back...
However far away, both in time and space, I cannot help but to imagine my own final thoughts. I picture memories coming forward. The people in my life appear in moments of joy, sadness, love, regret… Am I once again in my youth? I imagine my mind almost detaching from my failing body. There are memories of mathematics: moments of breakthrough and of frustration. And my students, who now teach their own students, passing on the dream and the responsibility of a mathematician, seem so young and unsure on their path of mathematics. Do I see myself among them? Do I find that seventh-grade boy emphatically writing his proof of a forgotten identity on his scratch papers? As I imagine him proudly writing down the last line of his proof, I involuntarily whisper, “Q.E.D.”