.Most of the symbolism found in our elementary algebra textbooks is less
than 400 years old.
1540 - 1603 -- Francois Viete
Viete was the greatest French Mathematician of the sixteenth century.
His most famous work is his In artem in which he developed a great
deal of algebraic symbolism. He used vowels for unknown quantities and consonants
for known ones. Viete also qualified coefficients of polynomials and used
+ and - symbols. He had no symbol for equals.
1560 - 1621 -- Thomas Harriot
Harriot was sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to survey what is now North Carolina.
He is considered the founder of the English school of algebraists. His work
Artis analyticae praxis was his greatest and was mostly about the
theory of equations. This set the standards for a textbook in algebra. A
lot of the work in this book was found in Viete's work, but Harriot's is
more complete and more systematic.
1601 - 1685 -- Pierre de Fermat
Fermat's most famous work may be what is called Fermat's last theorem. It was not his last theorem. He was in fact reading a translation of Diophantus' Arithmetica (it was Boethius' translation - not a very good one). At the time, books were printed on half a page (one column) so the reader could make notes. Fermat read about the equation
.
He wrote in his book that he had a proof that there is no positive integer
> 2 satisfying this equation. But he wrote that he couldn't write the
proof out because there was not enough room in the margin. He never went
on to prove it, so it became known as his last theorem.
1718 - 1799 -- Maria Gaetana Agnesi
She is best known for the curve called the "witch of Agnesi."
She wrote a textbook on differential and integral calculus which was one
of the first and most complete works on the subject.
1795 - 1858 -- George Peacock
He began to see structure in algebras, instead of using only numbers
he used objects. He showed the associativity and commutativity of these
objects.
1805 - 1859 -- Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet
Dirichlet made a huge jump from syncopated algebra to symbolic when he
gave variables a name.
1805 - 1865 -- William
Rowan Hamilton
Hamilton used the same concepts in addition and multiplication for other objects. He realized some things were commutative and some were not. For instance, quaternions (4-tuples) are not commutative with respect to multiplication. He later found matrices to be the same.
1806 - 1871 -- Augustus
De Morgan
DeMorgan developed symbolized logic not for numbers or sets, but for
language and propositions.
1815 - 1852 -- Ada Byron
She was Lord Byron's daughter. Her mother left her father a week after
she was born and vowed to raise her daughter as a mathematician and scientist,
so she would not be a poet.
1815 - 1864 -- George Boole
He developed what is now Boolean algebra in which he constructed an algebra
of classes in which logical problems can be solved by a process of formal
calculation.
1882 - 1935 -- Emmy Amalie Noether
Noether was the first to begin to see the general structure of everthing,
developing the theory of rings, ideals and unification of algebra. She is
considered the "goddess of algebra."