Étienne Bézout

Étienne Bézout

Étienne Bézout (Nemours, France, March 31, 1730 - Avon, France, September 27, 1783) was a French mathematician.

In 1758 he was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences and, in 1763, Étienne François de Choiseul appointed him to head the instruction of the royal navy. In 1768 he took charge of the teaching of the students of the artillery corps and wrote for his students Cours de mathématiques à l'usage de la marine et de l'artillerie.

He was also the author of a general theory of algebraic equations, published in Paris in 1779. This work contained many novel and important results about the theory of elimination and symmetric functions of the roots of an equation. He used the determinants in an article of the Histoire de l'Académie royale of 1764, but he did not study the general theory.

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