I’ve been teaching an on-line History of Math course (with a HUM humanities prefix) this term. The posts for that course are here. The most recent post was about the French mathematicians of the 17th century – Viète, Mersenne, Fermat, Descartes and Pascal. French Mathematics of the 17th century Francois Viète (1540-1603) Francois Viète was [...]
Archive for the ‘History of Algebra’ Category
History of Math
Posted in History of Algebra, Math History, Number Theory on March 6, 2011 | 1 Comment »
René Descartes and Friday the 13th
Posted in Applications, History of Algebra, Math History on November 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
What do René Descartes and Friday the 13th have to do with each other? A few years ago, I read the book The Mystery of the Aleph by Amir Aczel and enjoyed it immensely. In this book, he tells the story of Georg Cantor and his efforts to comprehend and mathematize infinity. I recently picked [...]
The General Quintic Equation
Posted in History of Algebra, Math History on December 8, 2008 | 3 Comments »
After the development of the Cubic and Quartic Formulas during the early to mid 1500s, mathematicians all over Europe worked to discover a formula for solving the general quintic equation, an equation of the form x5+bx4+cx3+dx2+ex+f=0. For 250 years they failed. During the early 1800s, two mathematicians began their brief careers and each would prove, [...]
Solving the Cubic
Posted in History of Algebra, Math History on November 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Italy was a center of mathematical activity after the publication of Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci (1202) and the Treviso Arthmetic of 1478. These books formed the foundation for European mathematics. At some point in the early 1500′s, an Italian mathematician named Scipione del Ferro determined a general solution for what is known as the depressed cubic [...]
