Let me begin by calming the nerves of anyone who thinks "foreign-cubed" is a long-forgotten high school algebra equation. I promise there will be no math in this column. "Foreign-cubed" refers to a ...

History is full of backstabbing rivalries: Edison and Tesla, Harding and Kerrigan, Tupac and Biggie. No less dramatic was a 16th-century conflict between Italian mathematicians Gerolamo Cardano, a ...

§CQ.1 THE FIRST GREAT ADVANCE in algebra after the Middle Ages was the general solution of the cubic equation, immediately followed by a solution for the quartic. I tell the full story in the next ...

A transformation that reduces coefficient count to one greatly simplifies the task of finding roots. has roots that are solvable by classical techniques involving the computation of inverse cosines, ...

Given any cubic or quartic equation with real coefficients, it can be transformed by a change of variable into a standard form, and thus solved by means of a double-sided scale (Fig. 1) in the case of ...