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Between Viète and Descartes: Adriaan van Roomen and the Mathesis Universalis

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Abstract

Adriaan van Roomen published an outline of what he called a Mathesis Universalis in 1597. This earned him a well-deserved place in the history of early modern ideas about a universal mathematics which was intended to encompass both geometry and arithmetic and to provide general rules valid for operations involving numbers, geometrical magnitudes, and all other quantities amenable to measurement and calculation. ‘Mathesis Universalis’ (MU) became the most common (though not the only) term for mathematical theories developed with that aim. At some time around 1600 van Roomen composed a new version of his MU, considerably different from the earlier one. This second version was never effectively published and it has not been discussed in detail in the secondary literature before. The text has, however, survived and the two versions are presented and compared in the present article. Sections 1–6 are about the first version of van Roomen’s MU the occasion of its publication (a controversy about Archimedes’ treatise on the circle, Sect. 2), its conceptual context (Sect. 3), its structure (with an overview of its definitions, axioms, and theorems) and its dependence on Clavius’ use of numbers in dealing with both rational and irrational ratios (Sect. 4), the geometrical interpretation of arithmetical operations multiplication and division (Sect. 5), and an analysis of its content in modern terms. In his second version of a MU van Roomen took algebra into account, inspired by Viète’s early treatises; he planned to publish it as part of a new edition of Al-Khwarizmi’s treatise on algebra (Sect. 7). Section 8 describes the conceptual background and the difficulties involved in the merging of algebra and geometry; Sect. 9 summarizes and analyzes the definitions, axioms and theorems of the second version, noting the differences with the first version and tracing the influence of Viète. Section 10 deals with the influence of van Roomen on later discussions of MU, and briefly sketches Descartes’ ideas about MU as expressed in the latter’s Regulae.

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Note by the communicator: For reasons of health Paul Bockstaele has asked me to receive and deal with all professional correspondence concerning this article. Please use in this connection my e-mail or postal addresses: Henk J. M. Bos, Department for Science Studies, Aarhus University C. F. Møller’s Allé, B. 1110, 8000 Aarhus-C, Denmark. e-mail: h.j.m.bos@uu.nl

Communicated by H.J.M. Bos.

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Bockstaele, P. Between Viète and Descartes: Adriaan van Roomen and the Mathesis Universalis . Arch. Hist. Exact Sci. 63, 433–470 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00407-009-0043-4

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