30 Mar
2006
30 Mar
'06
10:33 a.m.
Vaughan Pratt writes: [...]
This slick proof seems only to have emerged in the past couple of decades. It is an interesting commentary on mathematics that it took this long for people to come up with an argument "for the rest of us." Maybe some people "knew" it all along, but in that case they were keeping pretty quiet about it.
This proof was used by Pontryagin in the April 1982 issue of "Kvant" magazine (targeting school-children!): http://kvant.mccme.ru/1982/04/osnovnaya_teorema_algebry.htm (in Russian, but pictures should be enough).
Vaughan Pratt
Nikita.