Alexandre-Théophile Vandermonde

Alexandre-Théophile Vandermonde (28 February 1735 to 1 January 1796) was a French mathematician, musician and chemist who worked with Bézout and Lavoisier and whose name is now principally associated with determinant theory. Born and died in Paris, he was a violinist who turned to mathematics only around 1770. His 1771 memoir on the solution of equations treated symmetric functions and cyclotomic polynomials and anticipated later Galois theory, while his paper on problems of situation studied knight's tours and stressed the topological features of knots, presaging knot theory. Two memoirs of 1772 dealt with combinatorics and with the foundations of determinant theory. These papers make up all of his published mathematical work. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1771, taught at the École Normale Supérieure and examined at the École polytechnique. Vandermonde matrices and Vandermonde's identity are named after him.