It should be stressed that neither Cauchy nor Jacques Sturm realised the generality of the ideas they were introducing and saw them only in the specific contexts in which they were working. Jacobi from around 1830 and then Kronecker and Weierstrass in the 1850's and 1860's also looked at matrix results but again in a special context, this time the notion of a linear transformation. Jacobi published three treatises on determinants in 1841. These were important in that for the first time the definition of the determinant was made in an algorithmic way and the entries in the determinant were not specified so his results applied equally well to cases were the entries were numbers or to where they were functions. These three papers by Jacobi made the idea of a determinant widely known.