Olinde Rodrigues

Who was Olinde Rodrigues?

Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues, more commonly known as Olinde Rodrigues, was a French banker, mathematician, and social reformer.

Rodrigues was born into a well-to-do Sephardi Jewish family in Bordeaux.

Rodrigues was awarded a doctorate in mathematics on 28 June 1815 by the University of Paris. His dissertation contains the result now called Rodrigues' formula.

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.

In 1840 he published a result on transformation groups, which applied Leonhard Euler's four squares formula, a precursor to the quaternions of William Rowan Hamilton, to the problem of representing rotations in space. However, during his own times, his work on mathematics was largely ignored, and he has only been rediscovered late in the twentieth century.

Rodrigues is remembered for three results: Rodrigues' rotation formula for vectors; and the Rodrigues formula about series of orthogonal polynomials; and the Euler–Rodrigues parameters.