Connor, 

     Very good mathematical biography of Viete (including a
   discussion of other things he did and some of the colorful
   history of the period).  A few comments:

   (1) You might be interested to know that, in the polemic
       over the Gregorian calendar reform, Viete's opponent
       Christopher Clavius was a Jesuit priest.  Clavius 
       essentially designed the new calendar, which required
       an adjustment of 10 days when it was instituted: 4 
       October 1582 was followed by 15 October 1582. Some of 
       the opposition to this reform came from the fact that 
       people were afraid that wages for those "lost" days 
       would disappear(!) By this time, Clavius was the ranking 
       mathematician in the Jesuit order.  He taught at the Collegio 
       Romano, the main Jesuit university in Rome.  He also 
       one of the main advocates for the study of mathematics 
       in the Jesuit schools--he's the ultimate reason our 
       department exists, in a sense! Throughout his career,
       he was also known as a prolific author of mathematics
       textbooks (including a well-known book on algebra). 

   (2) You are right that Viete's convention of using a,b,c, ...
       for variables did not catch on.  But his reworking 
       of Diophantus using letters instead of particular numbers
       was quite influential.

   (3) You're right that Galois' work on the solvability of
       equations by radicals essentially relied on "Viete's
       formulas for the coefficients of a polynomial in 
       terms of the roots.  However, there were many steps
       in between, and I don't know whether Galois would have
       been directly familiar with Viete's work. 

   Grade: A