Böcker av Jacques Sesiano

A whimsical examination of math in the Middle Ages. This book brings together many unusual and entertaining examples of Medieval mathematical exercises. Medieval treatises on arithmetic and algebra frequently include along with the usual commercial and daily life applications, mathematical games, and recreational problems. The latter, while still on the subject of trade or daily life, involve conditions that are quite unrealistic if not totally absurd. As this book demonstrates, the authors of these problem sets hoped to show that mathematics could both be fun and useful.

The science of magic squares witnessed an important development in the Islamic world during the Middle Ages, with a great variety of construction methods being created and ameliorated.

This volume contains the texts and translations of two Arabic treatises on magic squares, which are undoubtedly the most important testimonies on the early history of that science.

This edition of Books IV to VII of Diophantus' Arithmetica, which are extant only in a recently discovered Arabic translation, is the outgrowth of a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Brown University Department of the History of Mathematics in May 1975.