Rafael Bombelli - Accomplishments

Accomplishments

In honor of his accomplishments, a moon crater was named after Bombelli.

Bombelli is generally regarded as the inventor of complex numbers, as no one before him had made rules for dealing with such numbers, and no one believed that working with imaginary numbers would have useful results. Upon reading Bombelli's Algebra, Leibniz praised Bombelli as an ". . . outstanding master of the analytical art." Crossley writes in his book, "Thus we have an engineer, Bombelli, making practical use of complex numbers perhaps because they gave him useful results, while Cardan found the square roots of negative numbers useless. Bombelli is the first to give a treatment of any complex numbers. . . It is remarkable how thorough he is in his presentation of the laws of calculation of complex numbers. . ."