Olinde Rodrigues

French banker and mathematician (1795–1851) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues (6 October 1795 – 17 December 1851), more commonly known as Olinde Rodrigues, was a French banker, mathematician, and social reformer. In mathematics Rodrigues is remembered for Rodrigues' rotation formula for vectors, the Rodrigues formula for the Legendre polynomials, and the Euler–Rodrigues parameters.

Born(1795-10-06)6 October 1795
Died17 December 1851(1851-12-17) (aged 56)
Quick facts Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues, Born ...
Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues
Born(1795-10-06)6 October 1795
Died17 December 1851(1851-12-17) (aged 56)
Alma materUniversity of Paris
Scientific career
ThesisMouvement de rotation d'un corps de révolution pesant (1815)
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Biography

Rodrigues was born into a well-to-do Sephardi Jewish family in Bordeaux. His family was of Portuguese-Jewish descent.[1][2][3][4][5][6] He was awarded a doctorate in mathematics on 28 June 1815 by the University of Paris.[7] His dissertation contains the result now called Rodrigues' formula.[8]

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.

Rodrigues' 1840 paper developed new results on transformation groups.[9] It uses three numbers to parameterize the entries of a rotation matrix using only rational functions. When converted to four parameters, this representation is equivalent to a unit quaternion, and describes the axis and angle of a rotation. In addition, he applied spherical trigonometry to relate changes in rotation axis and angle due to the composition of two rotations. This formula is a precursor to the quaternion product of William Rowan Hamilton.[10][11] In 1846, Arthur Cayley acknowledged[12] Euler's and Rodrigues' priority describing orthogonal transformations.

Rodrigues is credited as originating the idea of the artist as an avant-garde.[13]

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