Background
Erland S. Bring was born on August 19, 1736, in Ausås, Kristianstad, the son of Jöns Bring, a clergyman, and Kristina Elisabet Lagerlöf.
Lund University, Paradisgatan 2, 223 50 Lund, Sweden
Erland Bring studied law at Lund University from April 18, 1750, and he took the state examination in law in 1757. Although he had not taken courses or written a dissertation in the Faculty of Arts, nevertheless he was awarded a Master of Arts degree from the University of Lund on June 23, 1766.
Lund University, Paradisgatan 2, 223 50 Lund, Sweden
Erland Bring studied law at Lund University from April 18, 1750, and he took the state examination in law in 1757. Although he had not taken courses or written a dissertation in the Faculty of Arts, nevertheless he was awarded a Master of Arts degree from the University of Lund on June 23, 1766.
educator lawyer mathematician scientist author
Erland S. Bring was born on August 19, 1736, in Ausås, Kristianstad, the son of Jöns Bring, a clergyman, and Kristina Elisabet Lagerlöf.
Erland Bring studied law at Lund University from April 18, 1750, and he took the state examination in law in 1757.
Although he had not taken courses or written a dissertation in the Faculty of Arts, nevertheless he was awarded a Master of Arts degree from the University of Lund on June 23, 1766.
Bring served as a lawyer and was a student teacher in the Göta Court of Appeal from November 4, 1757, and at the Svea Court of Appeal from December 20, 1760.
Beginning in 1762 Erland Bring was a reader at Lund and from 1779 a professor. He taught history at the university, although his favorite field was mathematics. In the university library are preserved eight volumes of his manuscript compositions on various questions of algebra, geometry, mathematical analysis, and astronomy, and commentaries on the work of L’Hospital, Christian von Wolf, Leonhard Euler, and other scholars. In 1790 Bring became rector of the university. As his health deteriorated with increasing chest problems, he made strenuous efforts to keep up all his duties including his teaching and his research.
In 1786 Bring’s Meletemata was published. Like many eighteenth-century mathematicians, he attempted to solve equations of higher than the fourth degree in radicals by means of reduction into binomial form, employing the transformation of the unknown quantity first proposed by Tschirnhaus (1683). Bring succeeded in reducing a general fifth-degree equation to the trinomial form, using a transformation whose coefficients are defined by equations of not higher than the third degree. This remarkable result received practically no attention at the time and was obtained independently by George Birch Jerrard in his Mathematical Researches (1832-1835). Shortly thereafter, Sir William R. Hamilton demonstrated (1836) that with the aid of this operation a general fifth-degree equation reduces to any of four trinomial forms. It is not known whether Bring hoped to solve the fifth-degree equation in radicals with the aid of his transformation; Jerrard retained this hope, even though Niels Abel proved (1824-1826) that such a solution is impossible for a general fifth-degree equation.
In 1837 Bring’s nephew, the historian Ebbe Samuel Bring tried unsuccessfully to attract the attention of mathematicians to the algebraic investigations of his uncle. The deep significance of the Bring-Jerrard transformation was ascertained only after Charles Hermite (1858) used the above-mentioned trinomial form for the solution of fifth-degree equations with the aid of elliptic modular functions, thereby laying the foundations for new methods of studying and solving equations of higher degrees with the aid of transcendental functions.
Hermite cited only Jerrard, calling his result the most important event in the theory of fifth-degree equations since Abel. Shortly thereafter, in 1861, the scholarly world also recognized Bring’s merits, mainly through the efforts of Carl J. D. Hill, professor of mathematics at Lund University.
On April 27, 1791, Erland Bring married Ingrid Katarina Ringberg, the daughter of Nils Ringberg, who was the vicar of Vasby.