Berry math dudes for cubics that actually matter or something

Luca Pacioli

Luca Pacioli

teacher of Leonardo da Vinci; wrote Summa de Arithmetica;  Pacioli’s Conclusion is that a solution to the cubic equation is impossible;

11th century Persian Mathematician Omar Khayyam -

identified 19 different cubic equations keeping all coefficients positive but still fell short of his goal of achieving the ultimate goal of finding the general solution to the cubic.

Scipione del Ferro

is a mathematics professor at the University of Bologna. Sometime around 1510, he finds a method to reliably solve depressed cubics. He keeps it secret to protect his job. He gave away his secret to his student on his deathbed.

Antonio Fior

student of Scipione del Ferro who does not have much math talent and boasts his talent to solve the depressed cubic (challenged someone and was humiliated)

Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia

 recently moved to Fior’s town, faced adversity and had a stutter because of a cut from a French solider (known as Tartalgia) - challenged Fior to math challenge and solved all the depressed cubic problems given to him by Fior because of Fior’s boastfulness. / second human to solve the depressed cubic, became a celebrity after his victory.

Gerolama Cardano

  a polymath based in milan that was desperate to learn how Niccolo Fontana solved the cubic, wrote several letter to him despite him saying that he would not share a single question from the battle, eventually Niccolo gave in after hearing of him being introduced to his wealthy benefactor. Lures him to Milan and gets the formula and makes an oath to never share it so that no one knows it even after he dies. He plays around with the formula and discovers how to make a depressed cubic from a general cubic equation. He wants to publish it because he already has money and is not a mathematician but rather a physician and famous intellectual. He ran into the son-in-law of Scipione del Ferro in Bologna who had the formula of how to solve the depressed cubic, thus he posted Ars Magna. After, however, he had some problems which yielded negative roots and when he tried to ask Niccolo he said he was just dumb and didn't know how to use the formula correctly, but the reality is that he does not know how to solve it either.

Rafael Bombelli

He found out how to solve for the root and that you must abandon the geometric proof that Cardano used in the first place to make the algorithm.

Francois Viete

introduced the modern symbolic notation for algebra,ending the millennia-long tradition of math problems as drawings and wordy descriptions .Geometry is no longer the source of truth.

Rene Descartes

makes heavy use of the square roots of negatives and while he recognizes their use he names them imaginary numbers.

Euler

 introduced the letter i to represent the square root of negative 1, The cubic led to the invention of these new numbers and liberated algebra from geometry.

 Erwin Schrödinger

searching for a wave equation that governs the behavior of quantum particles building on de Broglie's insight that matter consists of waves. He comes up with one of the most important and famous equations in all of physics, the Schrödinger equation. And featured prominently within it is i,

the square root of the negative one.