Red Lion Court, Fleet St
May 3
Sir,
I was happy to be favoured with your approbation of my new undertaking, the “Scientific Memoirs,” <1> and your suggestion with regards to Fresnel’s <2> writings, and the journals of Crelle and Gergonne. <3>
I am making progress with a first Part, & hope to obtain more advice & materials as I proceed. Mr Lubbock <4> informed me that probably you might favour me with Abel’s <5> proof of the Impossibility of Solving Equations of 5 Dimensions.
I must depend much on the advice of my Friends as to the policy of giving much pure Mathematics. My aim is to make the work really useful, & at the same time just sufficiently popular to support itself permanently.
I am, Sir, with many thanks,
Yours, most respectfully <sic>,
Richard Taylor
Notes:
1. Scientific memoirs, selected from the transactions of foreign academies of science and learned societies (London: R. and J. E. Taylor, 1837–1852).
2. Augustine Jean Fresnel (1788–1827), French physicist.
3. August Leopold Crelle (1780–1855), German mathematician, ed., Journal für die Reine und angewandte Mathematik. Joseph Diez Gergonne (1771–1859), French mathematician.
4. Sir John William Lubbock, 3rd Baronet (1803–1865), mathematician & astronomer.
5. Niels Henrik Abel (1802–1829), mathematician whose theorem (written in 1824) was lost in Paris, rediscovered in 1828, and proved the impossibility of solving equations of the fifth degree (quintic euqations) through the use of radicals.