Pierre Wantzel

Pierre -Laurent Wantzel ( born June 5, 1814 Paris, † May 21, 1848 ) was a French mathematician.

Life

Wantzels parents were Frédéric Wantzel, professor of applied mathematics at the Ecole speciale du Commerce in Paris, and Marie born Aldon Beaulieu. He spent his childhood in Écouen near Paris.

1826 Wantzel entered the Ecole des Arts et Metiers de Chalons, where he was taught by Étienne Bobillier in mathematics. In 1828 he moved to the Collège Charlemagne, 1832 École Polytechnique and École des ponts et 1834 to chaussées, where he was trained as an engineer. From 1838 he was a lecturer at the École polytechnique for Analysis and since 1841 professor of applied mechanics at the École des ponts et chaussées.

On February 21, 1842 Wantzel married the daughter of a former teacher and has two daughters.

Work

1829, at the age of 15 years, published Wantzel evidence of a widespread, but until then still unproven method for the determination of square roots.

Wantzel showed in a paper of 1837, that there can be no construction with ruler and compass for the duplication of the cube and the angle trisection. Furthermore, he showed that the number of sides of a constructible polygon must meet the numerical condition, a product of a power of two, and ( with each other ) different Fermat primes to be (this condition is met, Carl Friedrich Gauss had already shown a construction is possible ).

1845 delivered Wantzel a new proof of the impossibility of general algebraic equations to be solved by radicals.

Writings

• Recherches sur les moyens de reconnaître si un Problème de Géométrie peut se résoudre avec la regle et le compas. Journal de Mathématiques pure, tome 2 (1837 ), p. 366-372.

• De l' impossibilité de toutes les équations résoudre algébriques avec des radicaux. Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques, tome 4 (1845 ), p. 57-65.