Niels Henrik Abel
Videos
Page
Niels Henrik Abel was a Norwegian mathematician who made pioneering contributions in a variety of fields. His most famous single result is the first complete proof demonstrating the impossibility of solving the general quintic equation in radicals. This question was one of the outstanding open problems of his day, and had been unresolved for over 250 years. He was also an innovator in the field of elliptic functions, discoverer of Abelian functions. He made his discoveries while living in poverty and died at the age of 26 from tuberculosis.
Niels Henrik Abel
Postcard of Gjerstad church and rectory in 1890–95. The main building of the rectory was the same as when Abel lived here.
From the notebook of Niels Henrik Abel
Christine Kemp
Adrien-Marie Legendre
Videos
Page
Adrien-Marie Legendre was a French mathematician who made numerous contributions to mathematics. Well-known and important concepts such as the Legendre polynomials and Legendre transformation are named after him. He is also known for his contributions to the method of least squares, and was the first to officially publish on it, though Carl Friedrich Gauss had discovered it before him.
Watercolor caricature by Julien-Léopold Boilly (see § Mistaken portrait), the only known portrait of Legendre
Legendre's grave at the Auteuil cemetery
1820 watercolor caricatures of the French mathematicians Adrien-Marie Legendre (left) and Joseph Fourier (right) by French artist Julien-Léopold Boilly, watercolor portrait numbers 29 and 30 of Album de 73 portraits-charge aquarellés des membres de I'Institut.
Side view sketching of French politician Louis Legendre (1752–1797), whose portrait had been mistakenly used, for nearly 200 years, to represent French mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre, i.e. up until 2005 when the mistake was discovered.