I Remain - Digital Archive

Cayley, Arthur, 1821-1895.
A memoir on the quintic equation / by Prof. Cayley.
By the time of Euclid, the Greeks knew how to solve quadratic equations. The general solution of the cubic equation was found by Tartaglia and Cardano in the 16th century, and the general solution of the quartic equation was found by Ferrari shortly thereafter. Attention then turned to the quintic equation, and the attempt to solve it was one of the central themes in the development of algebra over the next three centuries. Finally, in 1824 Abel showed that there is no formula for the solution of the general quintic. Nowadays, this result is best understood in the context of Galois theory. Galois's work was done in 1832 but did not become known until its posthumous publication by Liouville in 1846. The quintic continued to hold great interest for mathematicians, including Cayley and especially Harley, and many of their joint computations were related to it. (In modern language, they investigated the resolvent and discriminant of the general quintic.) This interest for Cayley continued throughout his lifetime. One of his last published papers, in 1894, dealt with the quintic: [950] Arthur Cayley, On the sextic resolvent equations of Jacobi and Kronecker, J. reine angew. Math. CXIII (1894), 42-49. Moreover, he was preparing a paper on the quintic, which was incomplete at his death. The manuscript here consists of several drafts of this paper. (In one of these drafts, he refers to his 1894 paper on the sextic resolvent equations of Jacobi and Kronecker [950].)

Prof. Steven H. Weintraub, Dept. of Mathematics, Lehigh University.
Cayley, Arthur, 1821-1895.
[Letters] 1859 September 24 - 1863 May 2, London, [to Robert Harley] / A[rthur] Cayley.
The letters here are a collection of 40 letters written by Cayley to Harley between 24 September 1859 and 5 February 1863. (We do not have Harley's half of the correspondence.) Harley's name does not appear in any of these letters and his identity has been deduced from internal evidence. Many of these letters deal with details of invariant-theoretic calculations that Cayley and Harley performed. Arthur Cayley was one of the preeminent British mathematicians of the 19th century. In 1863 he was appointed the Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at Cambridge, a position he held until his death at the age of 73. Robert Harley was a Congregational minister who was also well known for his important contributions to mathematics and symbolic logic.

Prof. Steven H. Weintraub, Dept. of Mathematics, Lehigh University.
Collins, Wilkie, 1824-1889.
[Manuscript] [pre 1874 October] "Fatal Fortune: A True Story" / Wilkie Collins [William Wilkie Collins].
Collins' manuscript is a short story told from the perspective of a woman who falls in love with a man suspected of being "mad." He has been subsequently disenfranchised of his fortune by scheming executors. An English novelist who wrote sensation fiction, Wilkie Collins' most popular works include The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868); a friend of Charles Dickens' (whose letters are also represented in the collection), Collins collaborated with him on No Thoroughfare (1867) and contributed to Dickens' periodical Household Words.
Curie, Marie, 1867-1934.
[Letter] 1922 May 25, Paris (France) [to] Mrs. Tyson / M. Curie [Marie Curie].
Curie briefly states that she cannot ask Mrs. Tyson to visit as her daughter has been ill, but they would love to have Mrs. Tyson visit after her return from Limoges. The first person to receive two Nobel Prizes (1903, 1911), Curie worked to isolate two new elements, polonium and radium, in 1898 in collaboration with her husband, physicist Pierre Curie. She pioneered work on the medical applications of x rays and introduced the concept of radioactivity to the world. After her husband's death in 1906, she was invited to take over his teaching position at the University of Paris, the first woman in France to hold such a post. In 1921 she made a highly publicized tour of the United States, honored by women's organizations and the White House.
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882.
[Letter] October 14, Kent (England), [to] Dear Madam / C. Darwin [Charles Darwin].
Darwin thanks the recipient for sending "capital specimens" of the male and female. Darwin remarks that there is "marked difference" in their wings which is new to him. He mentions that he hopes to have a friend examine the species in India, and thanks the sender for her offer to make further observations next summer. Naturalist Charles Darwin's speculations about evolution and natural selection in his Origin of the Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) were published and widely discussed during his lifetime.