Chuquet, Nicolas

Related Category: Mathematics: Biographies

(nēkôlä´ shükā´), c.1450–1500, French mathematician, probably b. Paris. Little is known of Chuquet's life. At Lyons in 1484 he composed a manuscript on the science of numbers, which was finally published in two parts in 1880 and 1881. The first part, called the “Triparty,” was a treatise on algebra and contained the first use of the radical sign with an index (such as the number 3, indicating a cube root); the second part contained the statement of, and the replies to, a set of 156 mathematical problems.