By Mario Livio
Evchariste Galois was a genius and a romantic who forever changed maths by inventing group theory before he was shot at the age of 20 in a duel, and his life would make a fine subject for a hollywood movie a la "A beautiful mind".
The life stories of him and a bunch of other mathematicians who quested to solve quadratic, cubic, and quartic formulas and prove that there can be no general formulistic solution for the quintic make up the bulk. There is an explanation of what a group is (closure, associativity, identity, inverse) and a few simple examples of groups plus explanations that they are used to describe symmetry. There is a nice section showing that if you are looking for the best mate, but can't go back to earlier ones you separated from, sampling about one third of the overall you could have and then sticking to the first one better than all these after that is the best strategy - which means if the best one was in the first third, you'll have to try all and will get stuck to the last one ... I assume unless you'd turn out to not be their final choice and end up alone.
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