"But how much more splendid the methods which reduce the problems which seem to be hardly capable of solution even with the help of surds in such a way that, while the surds, when bidden (so to speak) to plough the arithmetic soil, become true to their name and deaf to entreaty, they are not so much as mentioned in these most ingenious solutions."
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Diophantus
Diophantus of Alexandria (c. 201 - 285 AD) sometimes called "the father of algebra", was an Alexandrian Greek mathematician and the author of a series of books called Arithmetica (c. 250 AD), many of which are now lost. Diophantus was the first Greek mathematician who recognized fractions as numbers, thus allowed positive rational numbers for the coefficients and solutions.
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