Alexandre-Théophile Vandermonde
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Alexandre-Théophile Vandermonde (28 February 1735 – 1 January 1796) was a French mathematician, musician, and
Biography
Vandermonde was a violinist, and became engaged with mathematics only around 1770. In Mémoire sur la résolution des équations (1771) he reported on symmetric functions and solution of cyclotomic polynomials; this paper anticipated later Galois theory (see also abstract algebra for the role of Vandermonde in the genesis of group theory). In Remarques sur des problèmes de situation (1771) he studied knight's tours, and presaged the development of knot theory by explicitly noting the importance of topological features when discussing the properties of knots:
"Whatever the twists and turns of a system of threads in space, one can always obtain an expression for the calculation of its dimensions, but this expression will be of little use in practice. The craftsman who fashions a braid, a net, or some knots will be concerned, not with questions of measurement, but with those of position: what he sees there is the manner in which the theads are interlaced"
The same year he was elected to the
He was professor at the
Honors
- A special class of matrices, the Vandermonde matrices are named after him, as is an elementary fact of combinatorics, Vandermonde's identity.
- Vandermonde is the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.[1]
See also
Notes
Further reading
- Gilbert Faccarello, Du Conservatoire à l'Ecole Normale, Les cahiers d'histoire du CNAM, 2-3, 17–57, CNAM, Paris, 1993. [1] Archived 18 May 2015 at the Wayback Machine
- Jacqueline Hecht, Un exemple de multidisciplinarité : Alexandre Vandermonde (1735-1796), Population, 4, 641–676, INED, Paris, 1971.[2]