In June of 1993, the British mathematician Andrew Wiles (b. 1953) delivered a series of lectures on “Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves, and Galois Representations.” Though the audience was not large—the topic required a large amount of background knowledge—it had grown beyond expectations. It was rumored that Wiles would announce something […]
Tag: Algebra
Forgotten Algebra of the Babylonians
The trilingual Rosetta stone is justly famous for enabling the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. But its story is far from unique to the 19th century. Hundreds of thousands of clay tablets, written with cuneiform scripts in languages such as Hittite and Persian, also became readable for the first time in […]
Quintic Equations, French Politics, and Abstract Algebra
The familiar quadratic formula produces the two solutions of any equation of the form ax2+bx+c. And much more elaborate formulas exist for the three solutions of cubic equations (those with an x3 term) and the four solutions of quartic equations (with an x4 term). Similarly, equations with an x5 term—quintic […]