MODERN ALGEBRA
Modern history Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano published the solutions to the cubic and quartic equations in his 1545 book Ars magna . François Viète 's work on new algebra at the close of the 16th century was an important step towards modern algebra. In 1637, René Descartes published La Géométrie , inventing analytic geometry and introducing modern algebraic notation. Another key event in the further development of algebra was the general algebraic solution of the cubic and quartic equations, developed in the mid-16th century. The idea of a determinant was developed by Japanese mathematician Seki Kōwa in the 17th century, followed independently by Gottfried Leibniz ten years later, for the purpose of solving systems of simultaneous linear equations using matrices . Gabriel Cramer also did some work on matrices and determinants in...