General Knowledge
Which French mathematician died in a duel at twenty?
- Evariste Galois
- Niels Abel
- Sophie Germain
The answer is Evariste Galois. Galois, in 1832 — group theory in a night.
Évariste Galois was a French mathematician and political activist. While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a problem that had been open for 350 years. His work laid the foundations for Galois theory and group theory, two major branches of abstract algebra.
Wikipedia · Évariste Galois