Erland Samuel Bring (19 August 1736 – 20 May 1798) was a

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

mathematician. Bring studied at

Lund University , motto = Ad utrumque , mottoeng = Prepared for both , established = , type = Public research university , budget = SEK 9 billion algebraic solution A solution in radicals or algebraic solution is a closed-form expression, and more specifically a closed-form algebraic expression, that is the solution of a polynomial equation, and relies only on addition, subtraction, multiplication, divisio ...

of equations. Bring had developed an important transformation to simplify a

quintic equation In algebra, a quintic function is a function of the form :g(x)=ax^5+bx^4+cx^3+dx^2+ex+f,\, where , , , , and are members of a field, typically the rational numbers, the real numbers or the complex numbers, and is nonzero. In other words, a q ...

to the form

x^5 + px + q = 0

(see

Bring radical In algebra, the Bring radical or ultraradical of a real number ''a'' is the unique real root of the polynomial : x^5 + x + a. The Bring radical of a complex number ''a'' is either any of the five roots of the above polynomial (it is thus m ...

). In 1832–35 the same transformation was independently derived by George Jerrard. However, whereas Jerrard knew from the past work by

Paolo Ruffini Paolo Ruffini (Valentano, 22 September 1765 – Modena, 10 May 1822) was an Italian mathematician and philosopher. Education and Career By 1788 he had earned university degrees in philosophy, medicine/surgery and mathematics. His works inclu ...

and

Niels Henrik Abel Niels Henrik Abel ( , ; 5 August 1802 – 6 April 1829) was a Norwegian mathematician who made pioneering contributions in a variety of fields. His most famous single result is the first complete proof demonstrating the impossibility of solvin ...

that a general quintic equation can not be solved, this fact was not known to Bring, putting him in a disadvantage.J J O'Connor and E F Robertso
Erland Samuel Bring
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Bring's curve In mathematics, Bring's curve (also called Bring's surface) is the curve given by the equations :v+w+x+y+z=v^2+w^2+x^2+y^2+z^2=v^3+w^3+x^3+y^3+z^3=0. It was named by after Erland Samuel Bring who studied a similar construction in 1786 in a Promot ...

is named after him.

References

1736 births 1798 deaths 18th-century Swedish mathematicians Algebraists {{Sweden-mathematician-stub