François Viète

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 mathe…