Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues (6 October 1795 – 17 December 1851), more commonly known as Olinde Rodrigues, was a French banker, mathematician, and social reformer. In mathematics Rodrigues is remembered for Rodrigues' rotation formula for vectors, the Rodrigues formula for the Legendre polynomials, and the Euler–Rodrigues parameters.
Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues | |
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Born | |
Died | 17 December 1851 | (aged 56)
Alma mater | University of Paris |
Rodrigues was born into a well-to-do Sephardi Jewish family in Bordeaux. His family was of Portuguese-Jewish descent.[1][2][3][4][5][6] He was awarded a doctorate in mathematics on 28 June 1815 by the University of Paris.[7] His dissertation contains the result now called Rodrigues' formula.[8]
After graduation, Rodrigues became a banker. A close associate of the Comte de Saint-Simon, Rodrigues continued, after Saint-Simon's death in 1825, to champion the older man's socialist ideals, a school of thought that came to be known as Saint-Simonianism. During this period, Rodrigues published writings on politics, social reform, and banking.
Rodrigues' 1840 paper developed new results on transformation groups.[9] It uses three numbers to parameterize the entries of a rotation matrix using only rational functions. When converted to four parameters, this representation is equivalent to a unit quaternion, and describes the axis and angle of a rotation. In addition, he applied spherical trigonometry to relate changes in rotation axis and angle due to the composition of two rotations. This formula is a precursor to the quaternion product of William Rowan Hamilton.[10][11] In 1846, Arthur Cayley acknowledged[12] Euler's and Rodrigues' priority describing orthogonal transformations.
Rodrigues is credited as originating the idea of the artist as an avant-garde.[13]