Leonard Eugene Dickson and his work in the arithmetics of algebras

DOI10.1007/S004070050014MaRDI QIDQ1384086zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Della Dumbaugh Fenster

Publication date 19 June 2002

Published in Archive for History of Exact Sciences (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.1007/s004070050014

zbMATH Keywords

algebrasintegersL. E. Dickson

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

History of mathematics in the 19th century (01A55) History of mathematics in the 20th century (01A60) Biographies, obituaries, personalia, bibliographies (01A70) History of associative rings and algebras (16-03)

Review text

What is the appropriate generalization of the concept of integer for general algebras? This paper describes the historical and mathematical context for Dickson's general formulation in a way that touches upon aesthetic and social factors leading to the acceptance of a theory. In 1801, Gauss studied complex integers and their divisibility properties. Later, Ernst Kummer investigated more general algebraic integers and was dismayed at the failure of unique factorization. Rudolf Lipschitz in 1886 and Adolf Hurwitz in 1896 had competing definitions for quaternionic integers, which were complicated by the noncommutativity of multiplication. Hurwitz, already expert in the theory of algebraic numbers, brought more sophistication in relating the integers to the whole algebra. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, his student, Gustave du Pasquier extended the investigation first to matrices and then more generally. His struggles yielded some fruit, but his formulation lacked unity and ability to deal with unique factorization. This was left to Leonard Eugene Dickson, who in the early 1920s, began with quaternions and ended up with a general theory of hypercomplex numbers that recognized the significance of the structure theorems of Wedderburn.

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(12)

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