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Another subject that was transformed in the 19th century was the theory of equations. Ever since Niccolò Tartaglia and Lodovico Ferrari in the 16th century found rules giving the solutions of cubic and quartic equations in terms of the coefficients of the equations, formulas had unsuccessfully been sought for equations of the fifth and higher degrees. At stake was the existence of a formula that expressed the roots of a quintic equation in terms of the coefficients. This formula, moreover, had to involve only the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, together with the extraction of roots, since that ...(100 of 41449 words)