15 Facts About Michel Rolle

Michel Rolle is the co-inventor in Europe of Gaussian elimination.

Michel Rolle married early and as a young man struggled to support his family on the meager wages of a transcriber for notaries and attorney.

In spite of his financial problems and minimal education, Michel Rolle studied algebra and Diophantine analysis on his own.

Michel Rolle's fortune changed dramatically in 1682 when he published an elegant solution of a difficult, unsolved problem in Diophantine analysis.

Michel Rolle was promoted to a salaried position in the academy, a pensionnaire geometre,.

Michel Rolle had then already been given a pension by Jean-Baptiste Colbert after he solved one of Jacques Ozanam's problems.

Michel Rolle remained there until he died of apoplexy in 1719.

In that book Michel Rolle firmly established the notation for the nth root of a real number, and proved a polynomial version of the theorem that today bears his name.

Michel Rolle strove intently to demonstrate that it gave erroneous results and was based on unsound reasoning.

Michel Rolle quarreled so vehemently on the subject that the Academie des Sciences was forced to intervene on several occasions.

Michel Rolle preceded most of his contemporaries by adopting the current convention in 1691.

Michel Rolle was an early critic of infinitesimal calculus, arguing that it was inaccurate, based upon unsound reasoning, and was a collection of ingenious fallacies, but later changed his opinion.

Michel Rolle is best known for Michel Rolle's theorem in differential calculus.

Michel Rolle had used the result in 1690, and he proved it in 1691.

Pierre Varignon responded by pointing out that Michel Rolle had misrepresented the curve, and that the alleged local minima are in fact singular points with a vertical tangent.