Olinde Rodrigues

Olinde Rodrigues

Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues (6 October 1795 – 17 December 1851), more commonly known as Olinde Rodrigues, was a French banker, mathematician, and social reformer.

Rodrigues was born into a well-to-do Sephardi Jewish family[1] in Bordeaux.

Rodrigues was awarded a doctorate in mathematics on 28 June 1815 by the University of Paris.[2] His dissertation contains the result now called Rodrigues' formula.[3]

After graduation, Rodrigues became a banker. A close associate of the Comte de Saint-Simon, Rodrigues continued, after Saint-Simon's death in 1825, to champion the older man's socialist ideals, a school of thought that came to be known as Saint-Simonianism. During this period, Rodrigues published writings on politics, social reform, and banking.

In 1840 he published a result on transformation groups,[4] which applied Leonhard Euler's four squares formula, a precursor to the quaternions of William Rowan Hamilton, to the problem of representing rotations in space.[5] In 1846 Arthur Cayley acknowledged[6] Euler's and Rodrigues' priority describing orthogonal transformations.

Rodrigues is remembered for three results: Rodrigues' rotation formula for vectors, the Rodrigues formula about series of orthogonal polynomials and the Euler–Rodrigues parameters.

Publications

See also

References

  1. ↑ Simon Altmann, "Rotations, Quaternions and Double Groups"(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986, ISBN 0-19-855372-2): "The family is often said to have been of Spanish origin, but the spelling of the family name rather suggests Portuguese descent (as indeed asserted by the 'Enciclopedia Universal Illustrada Espasa-Calpe')". For more information on the Rodrigues as Portuguese Jews in Bordeaux see also the Jewish Encyclopedia "?". Jewish Encyclopedia.
  2. ↑ Altmann and Ortiz(2005), p. 12
  3. ↑ Olinde Rodrigues (January 1816). "De l'attraction des sphéroïdes". Correspondence sur l'École Impériale Polytechnique. 3 (3): 361–385.
  4. ↑ Olinde Rodrigues (1840) "Des lois géométriques qui régissent les déplacements d'un système solide dans l'espace, et de la variation des coordonnées provenant de ces déplacements considérés indépendamment des causes qui peuvent les produire" (On the geometrical laws that govern the displacements of a solid system in space, and on the change of coordinates resulting from these displacements considered independently of the causes that can produce them), Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées, vol. 5, pages 380-440.
  5. ↑ John H. Conway, Derek A. Smith, On Quaternions and Octonions: Their Geometry, Arithmetic, and Symmetry. AK Peters, 2003, ISBN 1-56881-134-9, p. 9
  6. ↑ Arthur Cayley (1846) "Sur Quelques Proprietes des Determinants Gauches", Crelle's Journal 32: 119–23, and Collected Mathematical Papers of Arthur Cayley, volume 1, page 335

Bibliography

Altmann, Simon; Ortiz, Eduardo L. (2005). Mathematics and Social Utopias in France: Olinde Rodrigues and His Times. Providence RI: AMS. ISBN 978-0-821-83860-0. 

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