Olinde Rodrigues

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Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues (1795 - 1851), more commonly known as Olinde Rodrigues, was a French mathematician and social reformer.

1 Biography
2 Why we call it the Rodrigues formula
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Biography

Rodrigues was born into a well-to-do Spanish Jewish family in Bordeaux. Jews were prohibited from enrolling at the École Polytechnique, the most prestigious school in Paris, and it is still unknown how he learned his advanced mathematics. Rodrigues was awarded a doctorate in mathematics in 1816. His dissertation contains the result now called Rodrigues' formula.

After graduation, Rodrigues became a banker. A close associate of the Comte de Saint-Simon, after the latter's death in 1825, he continued to champion his socialist ideals (Saint-Simonianism). Rodrigues published writings on politics, social reform, and banking.

In 1840, he published a result on transformation groups. However, his work on mathematics was largely ignored, and has only relatively recently been rediscovered. He died in Paris.

[edit] Why we call it the Rodrigues formula

In the MacTutor biography of Rodrigues, J.J.O'Connor and E.F.Robertson provide this information:

"The fact that we know it today as the Rodrigues formula is due to Heine [best remembered today for the Heine-Borel theorem]. Heine was an expert on Legendre polynomials, Lamé functions and Bessel functions and he wrote a book in which he proposed that, since Hermite had shown that Rodrigues had priority in discovering the formula, then it should be known as the Rodrigues formula."

[edit] See also

Rodrigues' rotation formula
Orthogonal polynomials which discusses Rodrigues' formula

[edit] External links

Simon L. Altmann (1989). "Hamilton, Rodrigues and the quaternion scandal". Mathematics Magazine 62: 291-308. ISSN 0025-570X.

Simon L. Altmann (2005). Rotations, Quaternions and Double Groups. Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-44518-6.
Simon L. Altmann; & Eduardo L.Ortiz (eds.) (2005). Mathematics and social utopias in France: Olinde Rodrigues and his times. American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI. ISBN 0-8218-3860-1. Corrects some of the traditional thinking about Rodrigues as a mathematician
O'Connor, John J., and Edmund F. Robertson. "Olinde Rodrigues". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.