ABSTRACT
The Academy thus became aware of the extraordinary gifts of this young scientist, who in the same year submitted a long essay, entitled “Theory of Systems of Rays,” which contained the germs of his later optical discoveries. The refereeing committee was impressed but found comprehension difficult and suggested a further elaboration of the theme. Newton thought of light as caused by the emission of minute material particles which moved with a very large velocity from point to point, whereas Huygens, and later Fresnel, thought of light as a propagation of wave surfaces. The greatest surprise is that the clear realization of the true significance of algebraic operations came so late. The eminent algebraist Frobenius showed, in 1878, that no numbers exist beyond the ordinary complex numbers, which could satisfy all the postulates of ordinary algebra.
