Paolo Ruffini, Italian mathematician and philosopher (d. 1822)

Paolo Ruffini (22 September 1765 – 10 May 1822) was an Italian mathematician and philosopher.

By 1788 he had earned university degrees in philosophy, medicine/surgery and mathematics. His works include developments in algebra:

an incomplete proof (Abel–Ruffini theorem) that quintic (and higher-order) equations cannot be solved by radicals (1799),

Ruffini's rule which is a quick method for polynomial division,

contributions to group theory.He also wrote on probability and the quadrature of the circle.

He was a professor of mathematics at the University of Modena and a medical doctor including scientific work on typhus.