Genesis of the Abstract Group Concept: A Contribution to the History of the Origin of Abstract Group Theory

This informative survey chronicles the process of abstraction that ultimately led to the axiomatic formulation of the abstract notion of group. Hans Wussing, former Director of the Karl Sudhoff Institute for the History of Medicine and Science at Leipzig University, contradicts the conventional thinking that the roots of the abstract notion of group lie strictly in the theory of algebraic equations. Wussing declares their presence in the geometry and number theory of the late eighteenth and...