How ordinary elimination became Gaussian elimination (Q716156)

The paper is devoted to the history of Gaussian elimination up to the invention of computers. The author distinguishes three phases in the development of this method. After a short summary of the history in Section 1 the author discusses those three phases in detail. Section 2 examines phase one -- the period before Gauss beginning in China, continued in Europe in the late Renaissance and finished by Newton and Rolle. Phase two is considered in Section 3. It is the period during which the need to solve simultaneous linear equations, and solve them repeatedly, arose for a clear social purpose: statistical inference. The role of the method of least square of Legendre and Gauss is examined. The discussion of the phase two is continued in Section 4 where the efforts of professional hand computers to ease the labor are described. The last Section 5 treats phase three -- the matrix explications of Gaussian elimination that arose for investigative purposes in the first half of the 20th century. The paper is supplemented by an extensive bibliography comprising more than 200 items.