Francois Viète, French Mathematician

Francois Viète, French Mathematician

Francois Viète (1540 - 23 February 1603) was a French mathematician. He was a lawyer by trade, and served as a privy councillor to both Henry III and Henry IV. As a mathematician he created many innovations: the binomial formula, which would be taken by Pascal and Newton, and the link between the roots and coefficients of a polynomial, called Vieta's formula. He used letters to denote constants and variables and introduced the terms coefficient and negative. His algebra was no longer limited to the statement of rules, but relied on an efficient computer algebra, in which the operations act on the letters and the results can be obtained at the end of the calculations by a simple replacement. This approach, which is the heart of contemporary algebraic method, was a fundamental step in the development of mathematics. He died in 1603 at the age of 62 or 63.

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