… but who were they?

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to brief biographies of those mathematicians who were foremost in the development of the subject that we now know as Linear Algebra. We do not pretend that this list is exhaustive, but we include all who have been mentioned in the present book and in Basic Linear Algebra. Those included are:

Bessel, Friedrich Wilhelm;

Bezout, Étienne;

Cauchy, Augustin Louis;

Cayley, Arthur;

Fibonacci, Leonardo Pisano;

Fourier, Jean Baptiste Joseph;

Gram, Jorgen Pederson;

Hamilton, Sir William Rowan;

Hermite, Charles;

Hilbert, David;

Jordan, Marie Ennemond Camille;

Kronecker, Leopold;

Lagrange, Joseph-Louis;

Laplace, Pierre-Simon;

Lie, Marius Sophus;

Parseval des Chênes, Marc-Antoine;

Schmidt, Erhard;

Schwarz, Hermann Amandus;

Sylvester, James Joseph;

Toeplitz, Otto;

Vandermonde, Alexandre Théophile.