## The Cubic Formula and Galois Theory

I read a couple of books fairly recently that discuss the cubic equation: Barry Mazur’s Imagining Numbers: (particularly the square root of minus fifteen) and William Dunham’s Journey through Genius. They got me interested in this formula, which had always been an afterthought (to the extent to which it had been a thought at all) in my mathematics education.

The cubic and quartic formulas were perhaps the greatest accomplishments of Renaissance mathematics, and they were a key spur to Evariste Galois’ beautiful study of the symmetry inherent in polynomial equations. Yet I got a PhD in mathematics without knowing much more than the bare fact that such formulas exist. It should certainly be possible to understand these formulas in light of Galois theory, but such explanations are not easy to find.

I wrote this paper to pass on what I learned about the cubic equation, and how it can be derived in the context of Galois theory.

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