GALOIS, Évariste. Oeuvres mathématiques d'Évariste Galois. In Journal de Mathématiques pures et appliquées ou Recueil mensuel de mémoires sur les diverses parties des mathématiques, Année 1846, Tome XI. 1846.

First edition of collected mathematical works of Evariste Galois given by Liouville in this volume of the Journal de Mathématiques pures et appliquées .

A brilliant mathematician, misunderstood in his day and with a tragic fate (he died at the age of 20 in a gallant duel), Galois created the notion of group, and his work has inspired generations of mathematicians.
A brilliant student, he was misunderstood by his contemporaries. Poisson rejected the work he wanted to present to the Paris Academy of Sciences.
In 1832, on the eve of his fatal duel, Galois wrote his mathematical will, which he entrusted to a friend.
It was not until 1846 that Liouville published them in this volume of the Journal des mathématiques, and not until 1870 that Jordan recognized their importance.

"When, yielding to the wish of Evariste's friends, I gave myself up, as it were under the eyes of his brother, to the attentive study of all the printed or manuscript pieces he left behind, I therefore thought I had to propose as my sole aim to seek out, to unravel, to then bring out as best I could, what was new in these productions.

My zeal was soon rewarded, and I was delighted when, after filling in a few small gaps, I recognized the complete accuracy of the method by which Galois proves, in particular, this beautiful theorem: For an irreducible equation of prime degree to be solvable by radicals, it is necessary and sufficient that all the roots be rational functions of any two of them'.
This method, truly worthy of the attention of geometers, would alone suffice to secure our compatriot a place among the small number of scientists who have earned the title of inventor." (Liouville p.382).