François Viète is read about 193 times a day, in 62 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 23 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 398 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?He put letters where numbers had always been, and algebra became a different animal - abstract, flexible, able to say things it couldn't before.
Also in Deutsch
Photos 8
In their own words 1
, On symbolic use of equalities and proportions.
About this person
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.
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