Concept

Theory of equations

Summary
In algebra, the theory of equations is the study of algebraic equations (also called "polynomial equations"), which are equations defined by a polynomial. The main problem of the theory of equations was to know when an algebraic equation has an algebraic solution. This problem was completely solved in 1830 by Évariste Galois, by introducing what is now called Galois theory. Before Galois, there was no clear distinction between the "theory of equations" and "algebra". Since then algebra has been dramatically enlarged to include many new subareas, and the theory of algebraic equations receives much less attention. Thus, the term "theory of equations" is mainly used in the context of the history of mathematics, to avoid confusion between old and new meanings of "algebra". Until the end of the 19th century, "theory of equations" was almost synonymous with "algebra". For a long time, the main problem was to find the solutions of a single non-linear polynomial equation in a single unknown. The fact that a complex solution always exists is the fundamental theorem of algebra, which was proved only at the beginning of the 19th century and does not have a purely algebraic proof. Nevertheless, the main concern of the algebraists was to solve in terms of radicals, that is to express the solutions by a formula which is built with the four operations of arithmetics and with nth roots. This was done up to degree four during the 16th century. Scipione del Ferro and Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia discovered solutions for cubic equations. Gerolamo Cardano published them in his 1545 book Ars Magna, together with a solution for the quartic equations, discovered by his student Lodovico Ferrari. In 1572 Rafael Bombelli published his L'Algebra in which he showed how to deal with the imaginary quantities that could appear in Cardano's formula for solving cubic equations. The case of higher degrees remained open until the 19th century, when Paolo Ruffini gave an incomplete proof in 1799 that some fifth degree equations cannot be solved in radicals followed by Niels Henrik Abel's complete proof in 1824 (now known as the Abel–Ruffini theorem).
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Related concepts (11)
Algebra
Algebra () is the study of variables and the rules for manipulating these variables in formulas; it is a unifying thread of almost all of mathematics. Elementary algebra deals with the manipulation of variables (commonly represented by Roman letters) as if they were numbers and is therefore essential in all applications of mathematics. Abstract algebra is the name given, mostly in education, to the study of algebraic structures such as groups, rings, and fields.
History of algebra
Algebra can essentially be considered as doing computations similar to those of arithmetic but with non-numerical mathematical objects. However, until the 19th century, algebra consisted essentially of the theory of equations. For example, the fundamental theorem of algebra belongs to the theory of equations and is not, nowadays, considered as belonging to algebra (in fact, every proof must use the completeness of the real numbers, which is not an algebraic property).
Solution in radicals
A solution in radicals or algebraic solution is a closed-form expression, and more specifically a closed-form algebraic expression, that is the solution of a polynomial equation, and relies only on addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, raising to integer powers, and the extraction of nth roots (square roots, cube roots, and other integer roots). A well-known example is the solution of the quadratic equation There exist more complicated algebraic solutions for cubic equations and quartic equations.
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