Books

Each book gathers explanations and solved exercises, organized in chapters to read in order.

Recent posts

History of Mathematics · Augustin-Louis Cauchy: the rigour of analysis

Image credits

Historical images and photographs All come from Wikimedia Commons. We use the files or thumbnails provided by Commons, reduced to at most …

History of Mathematics · Augustin-Louis Cauchy: the rigour of analysis

The legacy of Augustin-Louis Cauchy

Cauchy is mad, and there is nothing to be done with him; and yet he is, at present, the one who knows how mathematics ought to be done. — …

History of Mathematics · Augustin-Louis Cauchy: the rigour of analysis

Stress in elastic solids

Cauchy never stopped being an engineer. In 1822 Claude-Louis Navier had presented to the Academy a theory of elastic solids based on forces …

History of Mathematics · Augustin-Louis Cauchy: the rigour of analysis

The integral in the complex plane

At the end of the eighteenth century, Euler and Laplace computed hard real integrals with a daring trick: they replaced the real variable …

History of Mathematics · Augustin-Louis Cauchy: the rigour of analysis

The derivative and the integral

Two years after the Cours d’analyse, Cauchy published the Résumé des leçons données à l’École royale polytechnique sur le calcul …

History of Mathematics · Augustin-Louis Cauchy: the rigour of analysis

Cauchy's inequality

The 1821 Cours d’analyse ends with nine notes, a kind of appendix with results Cauchy did not want to put in the main text. The second, on …