This deserves to be much better known it was very familiar to Descartes and others, and it was an important precursor to our modern notation and methods. In 1591, François Viète came out with an important book, introducing what is called the new algebra: a symbolic method for dealing with polynomial equations. The king admired his mathematical talents, and Viète soon confirmed his worth by cracking a Spanish cipher, thus allowing the French to read all the Spanish communications they were able to obtain. By 1590 he was working for King Henry IV. Nonetheless, he was highly successful in law. A friend said he could think about a single question for up to three days, his elbow on the desk, feeding himself without changing position. But his true interest was always mathematics. He began his career as an attorney at a quite high level, with cases involving the widow of King Francis I of France and also Mary, Queen of Scots. He studied law at Poitiers, graduating in 1559. You can see the overall shape, but the really exciting stuff is hidden.įrançois Viète is a French mathematician who doesn’t show up in those simplified stories. The simplified stories we learn about the history of math and physics in school are like blurry pictures of the Mandelbrot set. It’s not exactly self-similar, but the closer you look at any incident, the more fine-grained detail you see. It’s probably not new, and it certainly wouldn’t surprise experts, but it’s still fun coming up with a formula like this. Greg Egan and I came up with this formula last weekend.
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