Talk:Évariste Galois

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is within the scope of the following WikiProjects:
WikiProject Mathematics     (Rated Start-Class) Mathematics Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Mathematics, which collaborates on articles related to mathematics. Mathematics rating: Start Class High Priority  Field: Mathematicians Please update this rating as the article progresses, or if the rating is inaccurate. Please add to or update the comments to suggest improvements to the article. More on his mathematical contributions would be nice! Geometry guy 00:15, 17 June 2007 (UTC) WikiProject Biography     (Rated B-Class) This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page. Biography Portal B This article has been rated as B-Class on the project's quality scale. [FAQ] This article is supported by the Science and academia work group. More information about this article... The following comments have been left for this page: More on his mathematical contributions would be nice! Geometry guy 00:15, 17 June 2007 (UTC) (edit) WikiProject France (Rated Start-Class) France Portal Évariste Galois is within the scope of WikiProject France, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to France on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please join the project and help with our open tasks. Start This article has been rated as Start-Class on the Project's quality scale. See comments
This article has an assessment summary page.

WikiProject Echo has identified Évariste Galois as a foreign language featured article. You may be able to improve this article with information from the Hebrew language Wikipedia.

Contents 1 National spelling 2 Also solved by Abel? 3 Bad cut-and-paste error? 4 External Link to La vie d'Évariste Galois 5 WikiProject class rating

[edit] National spelling

This article seems to be using British "ize" spelling:

• "His argument is neither sufficiently clear nor sufficiently developed to allow us to judge its rigour."
• "The importance of the work was not generally recognized during his lifetime".

"Honour" is not an incorrect spelling, it is a perfectly normal British spelling. Rama 17:13, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

"ize" spellings are not distinctly British. The Webster's New World College Dictionary ("the premier dictionary of American English", or so sayth the cover), doesn't list recognise at all. The 1913 Webster so popular on the web lists recognise as a secondary spelling only. I don't see any reason not to change that rigour to rigor, or better yet, stop meddling with it. --Prosfilaes 17:38, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, I wasn't very clear: I meant that there are two sorts of British spellings, the "honour/centre/specialise" one, and the "honour/centre/specialize", this one being apparently of the second category (the "-ise" form seems to be actually typically British).

Typically, articles should be self-consistant, that's why I changed "honor" into "honour". Rama 17:47, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

I just made the spelling to "honor/rigor"; it turn out that the article was started with American spelling and that the piece of British spelling was added later on. It did not occure to me at first that this might have happened in this way. Sorry for the over-long discussion about this minor detail. Rama 06:10, 17 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Also solved by Abel?

IIRC Abel and Galois did not solve the same problem.

Abel showed that a general quintic polynomial could not be solved by radicals.

Galois derived a criterion to identify which quintic polynomials could be solved by radicals.

In other words Abel's work reduces to: "Not all quintics are solvable by radicals.", while Galois's reduces to: "Give me any quintic polynomial and I will tell you how to find out whether it is solvable by radicals or not."

The problem solved by Galois is much harder.

[edit] Bad cut-and-paste error?

The last three sentences of "Budding Mathematician" should obviously be the last sentences of "Early Life", if you pay attention to the dates and Galois' age in those sections. I'm going to fix it.

[edit] External Link to La vie d'Évariste Galois

I would like to propose the following link as a better alternative to the one in the current article. Maybe it isn't so much a better replacement, but we could add it anyway to get the biography in a diferent format... Also the sources cited aren't in italic style in contrast to book names cited on the "Final Days" section of the article.

[edit] WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 08:30, 27 August 2007 (UTC)