# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/francois-viete
# Generated: 2026-08-31T16:44:54.522Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/francois-viete"
name: "François Viète"
slug: "francois-viete"
description: "He put letters where numbers had always been, and algebra became a different animal — abstract, flexible, able to say things it couldn't before."
tagline: "French mathematician (*1540 – †1603)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Francois_Viete.jpeg?width=1200"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "France"
  isoCode: "FR"
category:
  name: "Academics"
  slug: "academics"
profileType:
  name: "Academic"
  slug: "academic"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1540"
deathDate: "1603-02-23"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           59.88
  momentum:             16.3111279333838
  historical:           24.268956
  currentAttention:     1.821428571428571
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "STABLE"
ranks:
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  country:  null
  category: null
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  - name: "Mathematics"
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  - name: "Law"
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  - name: "France"
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  - name: "Early Modern Era"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  François Viète was a lawyer who served as privy councillor to Henry III and Henry IV of France, but his after-hours obsession was mathematics. In the late sixteenth century he began using letters as parameters in equations, a move that sounds small and now feels obvious but cracked open the field. Before Viète, algebra was stuck in the particular; after him, it could speak in the general. The work set the course toward modern algebraic notation, and earned him a nickname he never heard: "the father of modern algebraic notation." He died on 23 February 1603, his legal career complete, his mathematical one just beginning to echo.