Item 142 - Letter from George Airy

4 pp.

Royal Observatory Greenwich - GA has sought to get rid of the imaginaries ever since the Root of Equation appeared and believes that he has at last succeeded: 'And now I have faith in the real thing: i.e. that every algebraic expression is divisible by a quadratic trinomial. I abominate all duplicate square roots, even when real, and I proceed thus with an ordinary quadratic' [GA gives the mathematical demonstration].