While plotting a revolution he also reinvented algebra

From Damn Interesting: "Paris, 29 May 1832. All through the night, a young Frenchman named Évariste Galois stayed awake, quill in hand, frantically scrawling notes and equations across dozens of sheets of paper. He had only been studying mathematics seriously for a few years, but he had proven to be a veritable prodigy. After quickly exhausting the knowledge of his teachers, he’d branched out into his own research, extraordinarily prescient. By all rights, Galois ought to have been lauded and laurelled by the scientific community for his work. Above all, he should have been recognised and rewarded by France’s prestigious Academy of Sciences. But Galois⁠—at least, by his own reckoning⁠—had received little but dismissal from the mathematics community. Now he sat feverishly scribbling, trying to commit as many of his ideas to paper as possible."

Williams Syndrome is like reverse autism: people who have it are almost too friendly

From the BBC: "Imagine walking down the street and feeling an overwhelming love and warmth for every single person that you met. That is a familiar experience for people with Williams Syndrome, a rare genetic condition that affects approximately 1 in 7,500 individuals. People with WS, often dubbed the 'opposite of autism', have an innate desire to hug and befriend total strangers. They are extremely affectionate, empathetic, talkative and gregarious. But there is a downside to being so friendly. Individuals often struggle to retain close friendships and are prone to isolation and loneliness. People with WS are also sometimes too open and trusting towards strangers, not realising when they are in danger, leaving them vulnerable to abuse and bullying. "It's very easy for someone to fool a person with Williams Syndrome and take advantage of them, because they are so trusting," says Alysson Muotri, a professor of paediatrics and cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California."

The surgeon who helped invent brain surgery almost killed his own sister

From The Walrus: "Opening the skull had never seemed more difficult to Wilder Penfield than it did on that cold December morning in Montreal. Staring at his sister’s shining white scalp, shaved for surgery on the heavy German-made operating table, he felt weak. It was 1928, and Penfield was one of maybe two dozen neurosurgeons anywhere in the world. The profession was new, thrilling, and shaky—as likely to kill as cure. Although Penfield and his protégé, William Cone, were starting to see improvements in their results, the field was still a Wild West with few rules, not even against operating on your own family members. It would be decades before Penfield achieved global fame for mapping the human brain and devising a surgical cure for epilepsy as the director of the Montreal Neurological Institute. Right now, it was just him, Cone, and Ruth in the antiseptic chill of the Royal Victoria Hospital operating room."

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.

In the 1920s celebrity preacher Aimee Semple McPherson suddenly disappeared

From Atlas Obscura: "On May 18th, 1926 the Ocean View hotel in Venice Beach had a very famous guest. She was one of the biggest names in L.A., Aimee Semple McPherson. She was a celebrity evangelical preacher. In 1926, she was only 35 but she had her own church, called the Foursquare Church. It was wildly popular, with thousands of congregants; all of Hollywood would come to watch her sermons. sermons were these wild spectacles. She had her costume designers and set designers, and she had wild animals. In one of her most famous sermons, she rode onto the stage on a motorcycle. When she really wanted to think and relax, she’d visit the Ocean View Hotel in Venice. On this particular day, she was working on a sermon, and at 3:30 p.m., she sets down her notebook to go for a swim, and she doesn’t come back. Her mother announces her tragic death to the congregation; but over the next few weeks, people keep on seeing her."

The British Army planned to drop anthrax-infected cakes to infect German cows

From Wikipedia: "Operation Vegetarian was an unused British biowarfare military operation plan developed from 1942 to 1944 during World War II. The plan consisted of disseminating linseed press cakes infected with anthrax spores into the countryside of Nazi Germany. The director of the Porton Down biology department was ordered to find appropriate suppliers of the chemicals needed for production of both the anthrax and the cakes themselves, along with the specialized containers to carry them to prevent contamination during transport. This also meant that some RAF planes had to be modified in order to drop the non-munitions payloads without destroying them in the process. The cakes would have been eaten by the cattle, which would then be consumed by the human population, leading to widespread death and disruption. Furthermore, it would have wiped out the majority of Germany's cattle, creating a massive food shortage for the rest of the population that remained uninfected."

A pilot used his parachute to slow down his crashing plane

Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis's Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's The Browser, Clive Thompson's Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy's Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova's The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com