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The Montreal Inter-University Workshop on the History and Philosophy of Mathematics presents:

"François Viète's Revolution in Algebra"

Jeff Oaks (University of Indianapolis)
Friday, November 29, 2024
3:30-5:00 PM
Leacock 927

Abstract: The algebra that drives nearly every aspect of modern science and technology has its roots in a radical innovation of François Viète (1540–1603), a French lawyer in the court of Henry IV. Seeking a more efficient means of deriving geometrical propositions for the purpose of astronomical calculation, Viète created an algebra in which the knowns and unknowns are not numbers but are the relative sizes of non-quantified geometric magnitudes. The nature of his algebraic terms are necessarily structured differently than the terms of the numerical algebra which had been practiced since antiquity, and that difference extends to their notational representations. In this talk I will describe that numerical algebra, contrast it with Viète’s geometrical algebra, and explain how Viète’s algebra was soon adapted again to a numerical context.

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