Étienne Bézout was a French

French people

The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...

 mathematician

Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

 who was born in Nemours

Nemours

Nemours is a commune in the Seine-et-Marne department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France.-Geography:Nemours is located on the Loing and its canal, c...

, Seine-et-Marne

Seine-et-Marne

Seine-et-Marne is a French department, named after the Seine and Marne rivers, and located in the Île-de-France region.- History:Seine-et-Marne is one of the original 83 departments, created on March 4, 1790 during the French Revolution in application of the law of December 22, 1789...

, France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, and died in Basses-Loges (near Fontainebleau

Fontainebleau

Fontainebleau is a commune in the metropolitan area of Paris, France. It is located south-southeast of the centre of Paris. Fontainebleau is a sub-prefecture of the Seine-et-Marne department, and it is the seat of the arrondissement of Fontainebleau...

), France.

Work

In 1758 Bézout was elected an adjoint in mechanics of the French Academy of Sciences

French Academy of Sciences

The French Academy of Sciences is a learned society, founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to encourage and protect the spirit of French scientific research...

.
Besides numerous minor works, wrote a Théorie générale des équations algébriques, published at Paris in 1779, which in particular contained much new and valuable matter on the theory of elimination

Elimination theory

In commutative algebra and algebraic geometry, elimination theory is the classical name for algorithmic approaches to eliminating between polynomials of several variables....

 and symmetrical functions of the roots of an equation: he used determinant

Determinant

In linear algebra, the determinant is a value associated with a square matrix. It can be computed from the entries of the matrix by a specific arithmetic expression, while other ways to determine its value exist as well...

s in a paper in the Histoire de l'académie royale, 1764, but did not treat of the general theory.

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