Michel Rolle

Michel Rolle (1652 to 1719) was a French mathematician best known for Rolle's theorem of 1691 and, with others, as the co-inventor in Europe of Gaussian elimination in 1690. Born in Ambert in Auvergne, the son of a shopkeeper, he received only an elementary education and worked as a transcriber for notaries and attorneys, yet taught himself algebra and Diophantine analysis. He moved to Paris in 1675, and in 1682 an elegant solution of a difficult unsolved problem in Diophantine analysis brought him the patronage of the minister Louvois. He joined the Academie des Sciences in 1685 in a low post and was promoted to a salaried place as a pensionnaire geometre in 1699. His most important book, the Traite d'algebre of 1690, firmly established the notation for the nth root of a real number. He was also one of the most vocal early opponents of the calculus, arguing so fiercely that the Academie had to step in several times.