[As a young teenager] Galois read Legendre]’s geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.

Kepler’s discovery would not have been possible without the doctrine of conics. Now contemporaries of Kepler—such penetrating minds as Descartes and Pascal—were abandoning the study of geometry … because they said it was so UTTERLY...

The boundary is where points are slowest to escape the pull of the set. It is as if they are balanced between competing attractors, one at zero and the other, in effect, ringing the set...