Niels Henrik Abel (1802–1829) was the Norwegian genius who settled a question mathematicians had chewed on for three centuries: is there a formula, like the quadratic formula, that solves every fifth-degree equation? Abel proved the answer is a flat no — there can be no such formula, ever. He did it at 21, paid a printer out of his own empty pockets, and died of tuberculosis at 26.
It is one thing to fail to find a formula; it is another thing entirely to prove that nobody
can. Abel's proof of the
Abel spent his short life in poverty, hunting for a university post that never came. Just two days after he died in 1829, a letter reached his home with the news he had waited years for: a professorship in Berlin. His story and Galois's rhyme so eerily — two revolutionaries in the same subject, both dead before 27 — that together they've become mathematics' great emblem of brilliance cut tragically short.