Étienne Bézout

Étienne Bézout

Étienne Bézout (born March 31, 1730 in Nemours , Département Seine-et-Marne , † September 27, 1783 in Avon ) was a French mathematician .

Life

Bézout's father was a magistrate in Nemours and had also planned an administrative career for his son, but after reading Leonhard Euler, he was driven to mathematics. After the publication of some works he was employed in 1758 at the Academy of Sciences , of which he became a member, and as a censor. In 1763 he became an examiner at the Marine Garden. In this capacity, he wrote his first textbook in 4 volumes from 1764–1767 ( Cours de mathématiques à l'usage des Gardes du Pavillon et de la Marine ), which was followed by another six-volume textbook from 1770–1782 ( Cours complet de mathématiques à l'usage de la marine et de l'artillerie ), when he was employed in the same position in the artillery in 1768. Both textbooks were naturally aimed at people with very little previous knowledge of mathematics.

In addition to a large number of smaller works, he also wrote the Théorie générale des équations algébriques , published in Paris (1779), which contained a lot of new and useful information, e.g. B. on elimination theory , resultants, determinants and the symmetrical functions of the roots of an equation. This book also contained Bezout's theorem . He first used determinants in a paper in the Histoire de l'académie royale , 1764, but did not deal with general theory.

Fonts

• Cours de mathématiques ... , edited by François Peyrard , Paris 1810.

See also

• Bézout's theorem
• Lemma of Bézout

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Étienne Bézout. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Literature by and about Étienne Bézout in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)

Individual evidence

1. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter B. Académie des sciences, accessed on September 19, 2019 (French).