Albert Girard (French pronunciation: [alˈbɛʁ ʒiˈʁaʁ]) (11 October 1595 in Saint-Mihiel, France − 8 December 1632 in Leiden, The Netherlands) was a French-born mathematician.
He "had early thoughts on the fundamental theorem of algebra"[1] and gave the inductive definition for the Fibonacci numbers.
In the opinion of Charles Hutton,[4] Girard was ...the first person who understood the general doctrine of the formation of the coefficients of the powers from the sum of the roots and their products.
In his paper,[4] Funkhouser locates the work of Girard in the history of the study of equations using symmetric functions.
Still later, in the nineteenth century, this work eventuated in the creation of group theory by Cauchy, Galois and others.