“Strangely enough, anyone wishing to write about Galois in Paris would do well to journey to Louisville, Kentucky.”–Leopold Infeld, Whom the Gods Love
LOUISVILLE, KY. French mathematician Evariste Galois (1811–1832), whose death in a duel at the age of 20 cut short a remarkably productive career, is only one of many mathematicians represented in a little-known collection of rare mathematical and astronomical books at the University of Louisville library.
A visitor can leaf through the wrinkled, yellowed pages, stiff with age, of a 1482 edition of Euclid’s Elementa, through Narratio Prima, in which Copernicus’s pupil Georg Rheticus (1514–1576) first announced the Copernican sun-centered concept of the solar system, and through a copy of Isaac Newton’s Principia, with Newton’s own handwritten corrections on the errata leaf.