Niels Henrik Abel and solvable equations (Q1343720): Difference between revisions

In an unfinished manuscript (1828?) Abel described the roots of a solvable equation of prime degree, later repeated by Kronecker and Weber. The manuscript was published in 1881 in Oeuvres complètes, but without a sheet of paper attached to it. Now both of them are analyzed in the light of modernized versions and later extensions. It is pointed out that on the last pages of the manuscript Abel had a clear idea of the general case of solvable equations, in particular the primitive ones. On the sheet Abel ordered the successively adjoined radicals so that every line has radicals with the same prime order over rational functions of the preceding ones. A conclusion is made that here Abel anticipated implicitly the notion of a tower of Galois, not using the concept of a group. Instead he must have thought of the conjugates of a radical expression as obtained by varying the arguments of the radical involved. Abel's statement in its modern version is formulated and proved as Theorem 1. The summary is: ``The development of the theory of solvable equations would probably have been different if Abel had written out Theorem 1 explicitly and realized its importance. The impact of Galois' work would then have been less in a field which it came to dominate''.