of remembering such an array of signs was comparatively great. We are reminded of the centipede having so many legs that it could hardly advance.
39. We have here an instructive illustration of the fact that a mathematical topic may have an amount of symbolism that is a hindrance rather than a help, that becomes burdensome, that obstructs progress. We have here an early exhibition of the truth that the movements of science are not always in a forward direction. Had the Greeks not possessed an abacus and a finger symbolism, by the aid of which computations could be carried out independently of the numeral notation in vogue, their accomplishment in arithmetic and algebra might have been less than it actually was.
40, Notwithstanding the defects of the Greek system of numeral notation, its use is occasionally encountered long after far better systems were generally known. A Calabrian monk by the name of Barlaam,[1] of the early part of the fourteenth century, wrote several mathematical books in Greek, including arithmetical proofs of the second book of Euclid’s Elements, and six books of Logistic, printed in 1564 at Strassburg and in several later editions. In the Logistic he develops the computation with integers, ordinary fractions, and sexagesimal fractions; numbers are expressed by Greek letters. The appearance of an arithmetical book using the Greek numerals at as late a period as the close of the sixteenth century in the cities of Strass burg and Paris is indeed surprising.
41. Greek Writers often express fractional values in words. Thus Archimedes says that the length of a circle amounts to three diameters and a part of one, the size of which lies between one-seventh and ten-seventy-firsts.[2] Eratosthenes expresses ⅛⅓ of a unit arc of the earth’s meridian by stating that the distance in question “amounts to eleven parts of which the meridian has eighty-three.”[3] When expressed in symbols, fractions were often denoted by first writing the numerator marked with an accent, then the denominator marked with two accents and written twice. Thus,[4] ιζʹ καʹʹ καʹʹ=1721. Archimedes, Eutocius, and Diophantus place the denominator in the position of the
- ↑ All our information on Barlaam is drawn from M. Cantor, Vorlesungen über Geschichte der Mathematik, Vol. I (3d ed.), p. 509, 510; A. G. Kästner, Geschichte der Mathematik (Göttingen, 1796), Vol. I, p. 45; J. C. Heilbronner, Historia matheseos universae (Lipsiae, 1742), p. 488, 489.
- ↑ Archimedis opera omnia (ed. Heiberg; Leipzig, 1880), Vol. I, p. 262.
- ↑ Ptolemäus, Μεγάλη σύνταξις (ed. Heiberg), Pars I, Lib. 1, Cap. 12, p. 68.
- ↑ Heron, Stereometrica (ed. Hultsch; Berlin, 1864), Pars I, Par. 8, p. 155.
