Michael Vaughan-Lee
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College Teaching I was a Mathematics Tutor at Christ Church from 1971 to 2010, but I am retired now, and living in Scotland Here is a photo of Sam Howison, who is now Senior Mathematics Tutor at Christ Church. And here is a photo of me. Follow this link for Mathematics at Christ Church: http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/maths. The writing in the background is by a famous French mathematician - Evariste Galois. He was killed in a duel in Paris in 1832, and the night before he died he sat up long into the night writing page after page of brilliant mathematics which became the basis for Galois Theory. Galois Theory is studied in the second and third year of the Mathematics course at Oxford, and gives the basis for solving some famous problems from Greek geometry such as the impossibility of trisecting the angle with a straight edge and compass. Galois Theory is also used to prove that there is no formula for the roots of the quintic polynomial analogous to the formula for the roots of a quadratic. (Formulae for the roots of the cubic and quartic polynomials were found by the Italian mathematicians Cardano, Ferrari and Tartaglia in the sixteenth century.) |