1445-1488

French Mathematician

The origins of modern exponential notation—the 2 in x², for instance—can be traced to Nicolas Chuquet, a mathematician who at the dawn of the modern era struggled to find symbols corresponding to the ideas with which he grappled. He was one of the first to treat zero and negative integers as exponents, and appears also to have been a pioneer in his isolation of a negative number within an algebraic equation. Chuquet also approached the subject of logarithms, and even touched on imaginary numbers, concepts far beyond his time.

Chuquet was born in Paris in 1445, and from about 1480 worked in Lyon as a medical doctor and copyist or master of writing. In 1484, he published his principal work, Triparty en la science des nombres. At this time, arithmeticians lacked even the most basic notational symbols such as those for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and...