The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07.
Chuquet, Nicolas
(nkôlä´ shük´) (KEY) , c.14501500, French mathematician, probably b. Paris. Little is known of Chuquets life. At Lyons in 1484 he composed a manuscript on the science of numbers, which was finally published in two parts in 1880 and 1881. The first part, called the Triparty, was a treatise on algebra and contained the first use of the radical sign with an index (such as the number 3, indicating a cube root); the second part contained the statement of, and the replies to, a set of 156 mathematical problems.