Siméon Denis Poisson was a major figure in French science throughout the first forty years of the nineteenth century. Though his papers lack the brilliant mathematical creativity of some of those published by even more gifted contemporaries such as Joseph Fourier and Augustin-Louis Cauchy , they nevertheless display a formidable talent for mathematical analysis, applied with great industry and success in a large number of investigations ranging over the whole domain of mathematical physics. Several were of such importance that even (...) on their own they would have sufficed to win him lasting fame. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article offers a social history of the “Galois Affair,” which arose in 1831 when the French Academy of Sciences decided to reject a paper presented by an aspiring mathematician, Évariste Galois. In order to historicize the meaning of Galois's work at the time he tried to earn recognition for his research on the algebraic solution of equations, this paper explores two interrelated questions. First, it analyzes scholarly algebraic practices and the way mathematicians were trained in the nineteenth century to (...) reconstruct the scientific meaning of Galois's research. By emphasizing the historically contingent nature of scientific debates, the paper argues that to historicize the work of a mathematician, we must historicize the scientific world as well. The second part of this article goes further to seek a fresh perspective on Galois's short career by analyzing the cultural, social, and institutional dynamics that governed how the mathematical community came to recognize an aspiring mathematician as one of its own. (shrink)