History is full of backstabbing rivalries: Edison and Tesla, Harding and Kerrigan, Tupac and Biggie. No less dramatic was a 16th-century conflict between Italian mathematicians Gerolamo Cardano, a ...

A new, simple form of a cubic equation of state (EOS) has been developed in a recent study. A comparison to experimental data and other cubic equations of state show that the new EOS is more accurate.

§CQ.1 THE FIRST GREAT ADVANCE in algebra after the Middle Ages was the general solution of the cubic equation, immediately followed by a solution for the quartic. I tell the full story in the next ...