The quest to solve cubic equations led to duels, betrayals — and modern mathematics.

Cardano made rapid progress in solving the remaining species of cubic equations. His brilliant student Ludovico Ferrari then discovered how to solve quartic equations.

Given any cubic or quartic equation with real coefficients, it can be transformed by a change of variable into a standard form, and thus solved by means of a double-sided scale (Fig. 1) in the ...

It is inspired by Cardano’s solution of the cubic equation and Newton’s theorem on power sums, and yields an interpretation of generalized Lucas polynomials in terms of the theory of symmetric ...