Effective solution of numerical equations in 19th-century engineering
Résumé
In 1876, the French engineer Léon-Louis Lalanne wrote about the solution of numerical equations that "finally it must be recognized that, while continuing to earn the admiration of geometers, the discoveries of Lagrange, Cauchy, Fourier, Sturm, Hermite, etc., did not always provide easily practicable means for the determination of the roots". To clarify the meaning of this statement, we propose to study some alternative methods, numerical or graphical, developed by 19th-century engineers and other practitioners to obtain effective solutions more adapted to the problems they had to deal with.
