Given a system of n linear equations in n unknowns, its determinant was defined as the result of a certain combination of multiplication and addition of the coefficients of the equations that allowed the values of the unknowns to be calculated directly. For example, given the system a1x + b1y = c1 a2x + b2y = c2 the determinant Δ of the system is the number Δ = a1b2 − a2b1, and the values of the unknowns are given by x = (c1b2 − c2b1)/Δ y = (a1c2 − a2c1)/Δ.
Historians agree that the 17th-century Japanese mathematician Seki Kōwa was the earliest to use methods of this kind systematically. In Europe, credit is usually given to his contemporary, the German coinventor of calculus, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
In 1815 Cauchy published the first truly systematic and comprehensive study of determinants, and he was the one who coined the name. He introduced the notation (al, n) for the system of coefficients of the system and demonstrated a general method for calculating the determinant.
Matrices
Closely related to the concept of a determinant was the idea of a matrix as an arrangement of numbers in lines and columns. That such an arrangement could be taken as an autonomous mathematical object, subject to special rules that allow for manipulation like ordinary numbers, was first conceived in the 1850s by Cayley and his good friend the attorney and mathematician James Joseph Sylvester. Determinants were a main, direct source for this idea, but so were ideas contained in previous work on number theory by Gauss and by the German mathematician Ferdinand Gotthold Max Eisenstein (1823–52).
Given a system of linear equations: ξ = αx + βy + γz + … η = α′x + β′y + γ′z + … ζ = α″x + β″y + γ″z + … … = … + … + … + … Cayley represented it with a matrix as follows:
The solution could then be written as:
The matrix bearing the −1 exponent was called the inverse matrix, and it held the key to solving the original system of equations. Cayley showed how to obtain the inverse matrix using the determinant of the original matrix. Once this matrix is calculated, the arithmetic of matrices allowed him to solve the system of equations by a simple analogy with linear equations: ax = b → x = a−1b.
Cayley was joined by other mathematicians, such as the Irish William Rowan Hamilton, the German Georg Frobenius, and Jordan, in developing the theory of matrices, which soon became a fundamental tool in analysis, geometry, and especially in the emerging discipline of linear algebra. A further important point was that matrices enlarged the range of algebraic notions. In particular, matrices embodied a new, mathematically significant instance of a system with a well-elaborated arithmetic, whose rules departed from traditional number systems in the important sense that multiplication was not generally commutative.
In fact, matrix theory was naturally connected after 1830 with a central trend in British mathematics developed by George Peacock and Augustus De Morgan, among others. In trying to overcome the last reservations about the legitimacy of the negative and complex numbers, these mathematicians suggested that algebra be conceived as a purely formal, symbolic language, irrespective of the nature of the objects whose laws of combination it stipulated. In principle, this view allowed for new, different kinds of arithmetic, such as matrix arithmetic. The British tradition of symbolic algebra was instrumental in shifting the focus of algebra from the direct study of objects (numbers, polynomials, and the like) to the study of operations among abstract objects. Still, in most respects, Peacock and De Morgan strove to gain a deeper understanding of the objects of classical algebra rather than to launch a new discipline.
Another important development in Britain concerned the elaboration of an algebra of logic. De Morgan and George Boole, and somewhat later Ernst Schröder in Germany, were instrumental in transforming logic from a purely metaphysical into a mathematical discipline. They also added to the growing realization of the immense potential of algebraic thinking, freed from its narrow conception as the discipline of polynomial equations and number systems.
Quaternions and vectors
Remaining doubts about the legitimacy of complex numbers were finally dispelled when their geometric interpretation became widespread among mathematicians. This interpretation, initially and independently conceived by the Norwegian surveyor Caspar Wessel and the French bookkeeper Jean-Robert Argand (see Argand diagram), was made known to a larger audience of mathematicians mainly through its explicit use by Gauss in his 1848 proof of the fundamental theorem of algebra. Under this interpretation, every complex number appeared as a directed segment on the plane, characterized by its length and its angle of inclination with respect to the x-axis. The number i thus corresponded to the segment of length 1 that was perpendicular to the x-axis. Once a proper arithmetic was defined on these numbers, it turned out that i2 = −1, as expected.
An alternative interpretation, very much within the spirit of the British school of symbolic algebra, was published in 1837 by Hamilton. Hamilton defined a complex number a + bi as a pair (a, b) of real numbers and gave the laws of arithmetic for such pairs. For example, he defined multiplication as: (a, b)(c, d) = (ac − bd, bc + ad).
In Hamilton’s notation i = (0, 1) and by the above definition of complex multiplication (0, 1)(0, 1) = (−1, 0)—that is, i2 = −1 as desired. This formal interpretation obviated the need to give any essentialist definition of complex numbers.
Starting in 1830, Hamilton pursued intensely, and unsuccessfully, a scheme to extend his idea to triplets (a, b, c), which he expected to be of great utility in mathematical physics. His difficulty lay in defining a consistent multiplication for such a system, which in hindsight is known to be impossible. In 1843 Hamilton finally realized that the generalization he was looking for had to be found in the system of quadruplets (a, b, c, d), which he named quaternions. He wrote them, in analogy with the complex numbers, as a + bi + cj + dk, and his new arithmetic was based on the rules: i2 = j2 = k2 = ijk = −1 and ij = k, ji = −k, jk = i, kj = −i, ki = j, and ik = −j. This was the first example of a coherent, significant mathematical system that preserved all of the laws of ordinary arithmetic, with the exception of commutativity.
In spite of Hamilton’s initial hopes, quaternions never really caught on among physicists, who generally preferred vector notation when it was introduced later. Nevertheless, his ideas had an enormous influence on the gradual introduction and use of vectors in physics. Hamilton used the name scalar for the real part a of the quaternion, and the term vector for the imaginary part bi + cj + dk, and defined what are now known as the scalar (or dot) and vector (or cross) products. It was through successive work in the 19th century of the Britons Peter Guthrie Tait, James Clerk Maxwell, and Oliver Heaviside and the American Josiah Willard Gibbs that an autonomous theory of vectors was first established while developing on Hamilton’s initial ideas. In spite of physicists’ general lack of interest in quaternions, they remained important inside mathematics, although mainly as an example of an alternate algebraic system.
The close of the classical age
The last major algebra textbook in the classical tradition was Heinrich Weber’s Lehrbuch der Algebra (1895; “Textbook of Algebra”), which codified the achievements and current dominant views of the subject and remained highly influential for several decades. At its centre was a well-elaborated, systematic conception of the various systems of numbers, built as a rigorous hierarchy from the natural numbers up to the complex numbers. Its primary focus was the study of polynomials, polynomial equations, and polynomial forms, and all relevant results and methods derived in the book directly depended on the properties of the systems of numbers. Radical methods for solving equations received a great deal of attention, but so did approximation methods, which are now typically covered instead in analysis and numerical analysis textbooks. Recently developed concepts, such as groups and fields, as well as methods derived from Galois’s work, were treated in Weber’s textbook, but only as useful tools to help deal with the main topic of polynomial equations.
To a large extent, Weber’s textbook was a very fine culmination of a long process that started in antiquity. Fortunately, rather than bring this process to a conclusion, it served as a catalyst for the next stage of algebra.
Structural algebra
At the turn of the 20th century, algebra reflected a very clear conceptual hierarchy based on a systematically elaborated arithmetic, with a theory of polynomial equations built on top of it. Finally, a well-developed set of conceptual tools, most prominently the idea of groups, offered a comprehensive means of investigating algebraic properties. Then in 1930 a textbook was published that presented a totally new image of the discipline. This was Moderne Algebra, by the Dutch mathematician Bartel van der Waerden, who since 1924 had attended lectures in Germany by Emmy Noether at Göttingen and by Emil Artin at Hamburg. Van der Waerden’s new image of the discipline inverted the conceptual hierarchy of classical algebra. Groups, fields, rings, and other related concepts became the main focus, based on the implicit realization that all of these concepts were, in fact, instances of a more general, underlying idea: the idea of an algebraic structure. Thus, the main task of algebra became the elucidation of the properties of each of these structures and of the relationships among them. Similar questions were now asked about all these concepts, and similar concepts and techniques were used where possible. The main tasks of classical algebra became ancillary. The systems of real numbers, rational numbers, and polynomials were studied as particular instances of certain algebraic structures; the properties of these systems depended on what was known about the general structures of which they were instances, rather than the other way round.
Precursors to the structural approach
Van der Waerden’s book did not contain many new results or concepts. Its innovation lay in the unified picture it presented of the discipline of algebra. Van der Waerden brought together, in a surprisingly illuminating manner, algebraic research that had taken place over the previous three decades and in doing so he combined the contributions of several leading German algebraists from the beginning of the 20th century.
Hilbert and Steinitz
Of these German mathematicians, few were more important than David Hilbert. Among his important contributions, his work in the 1890s on the theory of algebraic number fields was decisive in establishing the conceptual approach promoted by Dedekind as dominant for several decades. As the undisputed leader of mathematics at Göttingen, then the world’s premiere research institution, Hilbert’s influence propagated through the 68 doctoral dissertations he directed as well as through the many students and mathematicians who attended his lectures. To a significant extent, the structural view of algebra was the product of some of Hilbert’s innovations, yet he basically remained a representative of the classical discipline of algebra. It is likely that the kind of algebra that developed under the influence of van der Waerden’s book had no direct appeal for Hilbert.
In 1910 Ernst Steinitz published an influential article on the abstract theory of fields that was an important milestone on the road to the structural image of algebra. His work was highly structural in that he first established the simplest kinds of subfields that any field contains and established a classification system. He then investigated how properties were passed from a field to any extension of it or to any of its subfields. In this way, he was able to characterize all possible fields abstractly. To a great extent, van der Waerden extended to the whole discipline of algebra what Steinitz accomplished for the more restricted domain of fields.
Noether and Artin
The greatest influence behind the consolidation of the structural image of algebra was no doubt Noether, who became the most prominent figure in Göttingen in the 1920s. Noether synthesized the ideas of Dedekind, Hilbert, Steinitz, and others in a series of articles in which the theory of factorization of algebraic numbers and of polynomials was masterly and succinctly subsumed under a single theory of abstract rings. She also contributed important papers to the theory of hypercomplex systems (extensions, such as the quaternions, of complex numbers to higher dimensions) that followed a similar approach, further demonstrating the potential of the structural approach.
The last significant influence on van der Waerden’s structural image of algebra was by Artin, above all for the latter’s reformulation of Galois theory. Rather than speaking of the Galois group of a polynomial equation with coefficients in a particular field, Artin focused on the group of automorphisms of the coefficients’ splitting field (the smallest extension of the field such that the polynomial could be factored into linear terms). Galois theory could then be seen as the study of the interrelations between the extensions of a field and the possible subgroups of the Galois group of the original field. In this typical structural reformulation of a classical 19th-century theory of algebra, the problem of solvability of equations by radicals appeared as a particular application of an abstract general theory.
The structural approach dominates
After the late 1930s it was clear that algebra, and in particular the structural approach within it, had become one of the most dynamic areas of research in mathematics. Structural methods, results, and concepts were actively pursued by algebraists in Germany, France, the United States, Japan, and elsewhere. The structural approach was also successfully applied to redefine other mathematical disciplines. An important early example of this was the thorough reformulation of algebraic geometry in the hands of van der Waerden, André Weil in France, and the Russian-born Oscar Zariski in Italy and the United States. In particular, they used the concepts and approach developed in ring theory by Noether and her successors. Another important example was the work of the American Marshall Stone, who in the late 1930s defined Boolean algebras, bringing under a purely algebraic framework ideas stemming from logic, topology, and algebra itself.
Over the following decades, algebra textbooks appeared around the world along the lines established by van der Waerden. Prominent among these was A Survey of Modern Algebra (1941) by Saunders Mac Lane and Garret Birkhoff, a book that was fundamental for the next several generations of mathematicians in the United States. Nevertheless, it must be stressed that not all algebraists felt, at least initially, that the new direction implied by Moderne Algebra was paramount. More classically oriented research was still being carried out well beyond the 1930s. The research of Frobenius and his former student Issai Schur, who were the most outstanding representatives of the Berlin mathematical school at the beginning of the 20th century, and of Hermann Weyl, one of Hilbert’s most prominent students, merit special mention.
