How ordinary elimination became Gaussian elimination

Newton, in an unauthorized textbook, described a process for solving simultaneous equations that later au-thors applied specifically to linear equations. This method — that Newton did not want to publish, that Euler did not recommend, that Legendre called “ordinary, ” and that Gauss called “common ” — is now named after Gauss: “Gaussian ” elimination. (One suspects, he would not be amused.) Gauss’s name became associated with elimination through the adoption, by professional computers, of a specialized notation that Gauss de-vised for his own least squares calculations. The notation allowed elimination to be viewed as a sequence of arithmetic operations that were repeatedly optimized for hand computing and eventually were described by matrices. In einem unautorisierten Textbuch beschreibt Newton den Prozess für die Lösung von simultanen Gleichun-gen, den spätere Autoren speziell für lineare Gleichungen anwandten. Diese Methode — welche Newto