"Anticipations of Cardan are more truly wonderful when we consider that the symbolical language of algebra, that powerful instrument not only expediting the processes of thought, but in suggesting general truths to the mind, was nearly unknown in his age. Diophantus, Fra Luca, and Cardan make use occasionally of letters to express indefinite quantities besides the res or cosa, sometimes written shortly, for the assumed unknown number of an equation. But letters were not yet substituted for known quantities. Michael Stifel, in his Arithmetics Integra, Nuremberg, 1544, is said to have first used the signs + and -, and numeral exponents of powers. It is very singular that discoveries of the greatest convenience, and apparently, not above the ingenuity of a village schoolmaster, should have been overlooked by men of extraordinary acuteness like Tartaglia, Cardan, and Ferrari; and hardly less so, that by dint of this acuteness they dispensed with the aid of these contrivances, in which we suppose that so much of the utility of algebraic expression consists."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Henry Hallam, "Imperfections of Algebraic Language," Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries (1866) Vol. 1, Part 1, Ch. 9, p. 452.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/History_of_mathematics
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
History of mathematics
159 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by History of mathematics →
Related Quotes
"The authors hope by publishing this work to demonstrate that the Arabs were not only transmitters of other cultures, …"
"In England, where it originated, the calculus fared less well. ...by siding completely with Newton in the priority di…"
"The evolution of number into the 'transfinite' was included only to emphasize the power of the forces acting within m…"
"The excellent work of Tropfke is an example of the tendency to break away from the mere chronological recital of facts."
"The mathematical genius can only carry on from the point which mathematical knowledge within his culture has already …"
"The Greeks studied the conic sections from a purely geometric point of view. But the invention of in the seventeenth …"
"The field of mathematics is now so extensive that no one can [any] longer pretend to cover it, least of all the speci…"
"Those people who do mathematics—the 'mathematicians'—are not only the possessors of the cultural element known as mat…"
"The fact that arithmetic and geometry took such a notable step forward... was due in no small measure to the introduc…"
"If the Greeks had had a mind to reduce mathematics to one field... their only choice would have been to reduce arithm…"