Wessel and his forgotten paper
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The plane representation of complex numbers appeared more than two centuries after their introduction by Rafaele Bombelli. Through unfortunate coincidences, the first two attempts at explaining its value became known only long after their publication.
Born in 1745 in Norway, Caspar Wessel studied at Christiania (present-day Oslo) and then at Copenhagen. Having become a surveyor, he was tasked by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters with drawing up a map of Denmark. Passionate about mathematics, in 1797 he presented to the Royal Academy a paper in which he was the first to introduce the geometric interpretation of complex numbers. This paper was published two years later but remained completely unknown to the mathematicians of the time. It was unearthed in 1897, and Sophus Lie had it published in French translation under the title Essai sur la représentation analytique de la direction.
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Argand, the unknown mathematician
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