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Cardano's treatment

Among the other feats of the Ars magna there was the first use of complex numbers that ever entered a treatise of algebra. It is true that Cardano himself considered them as arithmetic subtleties which were as refined as useless, but he nonetheless has the credit for having at least considered them. They are mentioned in the tex2html_wrap_inline214 chapter: find two number whose sum is 10 and whose product is 40. Now, tex2html_wrap_inline216 and tex2html_wrap_inline218.



Leo Liberti
Thu Feb 26 17:04:11 CET 1998