
Preface to the Third Edition
Galois Theory was the first textbook I ever wrote, although it was the third book,
following a set of research-level lecture notes and a puzzle book for children. When
I wrote it, I was an algebraist, and a closet Bourbakiste to boot; that is, I followed the
fashion of the time which favoured generality and abstraction. For the uninitiated,
‘Nicolas Bourbaki’ is the pseudonym of a group of mathematicians—mostly French,
mostly young—who tidied up the mathematics of the mid-20th Century in a lengthy
series of books. Their guiding principle was never to prove a theorem if it could be
deduced as a special case of a more general ...