1982年4月1日

1分钟阅读

埃瓦里斯特·伽罗瓦的短暂一生

传说这位年轻的数学家在决斗中被致命枪击的前一天晚上写下了群论。更仔细的调查表明，伽罗瓦的非凡想法需要更长的时间才能成熟

作者：托尼·罗斯曼

加入我们的科学爱好者社区！

00

Tony Rothman is a physicist and writer. He received a B.A.in physics from Swarthmore College in 1975 and a Ph.D. from the Center for Relativity at the University of Texas, Austin in 1981. His area of specialization is cosmology, the study of the early universe, and he has authored about sixty scientific papers on that subject. While a graduate student Rothman studied Russian at Middlebury's Summer Language School and at Leningrad State University. After leaving Texas he did post-doctoral work in cosmology at Oxford, Moscow and Cape Town. Rothman has been on the Editorial Board of 大众科学 (1988-1989). From 1990 to 1992 he was a Lecturer at Harvard. He has also been on the faculty at Bennington, Illinois Wesleyan University, Bryn Mawr College and since 2006 has been a lectuter at Princeton University. He is a board member of the Lifeboat Foundation. Apart from his scientific work, Rothman is the author of nine books. Most recent is Sacred Mathematic: Japanese Temple Geometry, with Fukagawa Hidetoshi (Princeton University Press, 2008), which won the 2008 American Association of Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence in mathematics. Previous books are Everything's Relative and Other Fables From Science and Technology (Wiley, 2003); Doubt and Certainty with George Sudarshan (Perseus, 1998); a novel The World is Round (Ballantine/del Rey 1978), three collections of essays: Frontiers of Modern Physics (Dover, 1985), Science a la Mode (Princeton, 1989; paperback, 1991), A Physicist on Madison Avenue, (Princeton, 1991); a collection of short stories about Russia entitled Censored Tales (Macmillan London, 1989); and Instant Physics (Ballantine, 1995). Doubt and Certainty was chosen by the "A-List" as one of the 200 most notable books of 1998. Both Princeton books were chosen as Library of Science Book Club selections; A Physicist on Madison Avenue was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Rothman was the scientific editor for Sakharov's memoirs (Knopf, 1990). In addition Rothman has written five plays, The Magician and the Fool, which won the Oxford 1981-1982 Experimental Theatre Club Competition; The Sand Reckoner, staged at Harvard in 1995; Melisande (1991); Plausibility, about Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil (1998); and recently, The Fiery Angel. His work on Galois won the Mathematical Association of America's Ford Writing Award for 1983. Rothman has contributed to The New Republic, Boston Review, Bostonia, 大众科学, Discover, Analog, Astronomy, the Gettysburg Review, American Scholar, American Scientist and elsewhere, and has appeared frequently on public radio.

More by Tony Rothman
大众科学 Magazine Vol 246 Issue 4This article was originally published with the title “The Short Life of variste Galois” in 大众科学 Magazine Vol. 246 No. 4 (), p. 136
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0482-136
View This Issue
© . All rights reserved.