1802 – Abel – bio
Niels Henrik Abel was born in 1802 in Norway and became a mathematician. He tried and failed to find a solution for the quintic equation and then completed Ruffini’s incomplete proof that it could not always be solved using radicals. This is now known as Abel’s impossibility theorem or the Abel–Ruffini theorem. Jacobi and Abel independently did similar work on elliptical functions.
PRECURSOR:
1654 – Bernoulli
1707 – Euler
1736 – Lagrange
1752 – Legendre
1765 – Ruffini
1777 – Gauss
CONCURRENT:
1789 – Cauchy
1804 – Jacobi
1811 – Galois
SUBSEQUENT:
1821 – Cayley
1826 – Riemann
1842 – Lie
1847 – Killing
1849 – Klein
1854 – Poincare
1887 – E8
