Historical Introduction
The prehistory of Galois theory can be traced back at least to 1600 bc, where among the mudbrick buildings of exotic Babylon, some priest/mathematician worked out how to solve a quadratic equation, and he or one of his students inscribed it in cuneiform on a clay tablet. Many such tablets survive to this day, along with others ranging from tax accounts to observations of the motion of the planet Jupiter, Figure 1 (left).
Figure 1: Left: A Babylonian clay tablet recording the motion of Jupiter. Right: A page from Pacioli's Summa di Arithmetica.
Adding to this rich historical brew, the problems that Galois theory solves, ...
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