Solving the Cubic Equation

Stories like this are why I like math history. Students, often rightly, think that the subject they study is too abstract and removed from the real human experience. Most high school math is not especially related to the everyday life of teenagers. Furthermore, it does rather seem like whenever a teacher presents examples of how the abstractions can be applied to practical problems regarding quantities such as mass or distance, the students quail at the prospect of the dreaded Word Problems. To be fair these do tend to be more complicated than the abstract ones, because life is complicated and the abstractions of math tend to simplify matters for the purpose of examining certain underlying numerical relationships. The question of whether education should inspire students to look past their daily life and expand their scope of vision is for later.

At any rate, the story of how Gerolamo Cardano came to publish the solution to certain cubic equations is full of rich human drama: secrecy, competition, betrayal, and an obscure poem, (which apparently sacrificed a certain amount of accuracy to maintain the proper Italian rhyme scheme.) The people who developed the mathematics we use today were people much like us, and the facts and techniques we try to teach to our teenagers were slowly developed over thousands of years. Mathematics is relevant to our lives not because we will need to solve equations in the course of daily life, but because using and developing the concept of number is a fundamental human activity. Much like poetry.