History of Vieta's formulas

François Viète studied the connection between positive roots of a polynomial and the coefficients of the powers of the unknown. His 1591 presentation of algebraic notation used letters for both known and unknown quantities, with consonants for known quantities and vowels for unknown quantities. That move makes it possible to express a relation for whole families of polynomials, rather than only a numerical instance. His historical setting concerned positive roots and expressions satisfying dimensional homogeneity; the modern splitting field formulation above is a broader statement.^[ref]