History
Lodovico Ferrari is attributed with the discovery of the solution to the quartic in 1540, but since this solution, like all algebraic solutions of the quartic, requires the solution of a cubic to be found, it couldn't be published immediately. The solution of the quartic was published together with that of the cubic by Ferrari's mentor Gerolamo Cardano in the book Ars Magna (1545).
It is reported that even earlier, in 1486, Spanish mathematician Paolo Valmes was burned at the stake for claiming to have solved the quartic equation. Inquisitor General Tomás de Torquemada allegedly told him that it was the will of God that such a solution be inaccessible to human understanding. However, attempts to find corroborating evidence for this story, or for the existence of Paolo Valmes, have not succeeded.
The proof that four is the highest degree of a general polynomial for which such solutions can be found was first given in the Abel–Ruffini theorem in 1824, proving that all attempts at solving the higher order polynomials would be futile. The notes left by Évariste Galois prior to dying in a duel in 1832 later led to an elegant complete theory of the roots of polynomials, of which this theorem was one result.
Read more about this topic: Quartic Function
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