Newton's identities
Identidades de Newton
- Date
- 1629 (Girard) / c. 1666 (Newton) · confidence medium
- Place
- Woolsthorpe, England, United Kingdom
- Credited to
- Albert Girard y Isaac Newton
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What was discovered
Formulas relating the power sums of a polynomial's roots to its coefficients, found by Isaac Newton around 1666 without knowledge of Albert Girard's earlier 1629 work.
What it led to
- Fundamental tool in the theory of equations and symmetric algebra
- Applications in number theory and combinatorics
- Methods for computing characteristic polynomials in linear algebra
- Use in symbolic computation algorithms