Institut de Recherche sur l'Enseignement des Mathématiques de Paris

Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus published an article on transforming equations in the Philosophical transactions of 1683. His idea was to remove all terms except the first and last and hence render the equation solvable. However he worked it out in detail only for equations of degree 3. In this seminar we will look at the historical and mathematical background to this method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will also briefly consider how similar ideas were eventually taken up (without reference to Tschirnhaus) by Euler and Bezout in the eighteenth century.