"Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was born at Rome c. 475. Not many generations after his death, the period being one in which historical criticism was at its lowest ebb, the church found it profitable to look upon his execution as a martyrdom. He was accordingly looked upon as a saint, his bones were enshrined, and as a natural consequence his books were among the classics in the church schools for a thousand years. It is pathetic, however, to think of the medieval student trying to extract mental nourishment from a work so abstract, so meaningless, so unnecessarily complicated, as the arithmetic of Boethius."
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The Hindu-Arabic Numerals
The Hindu-Arabic Numerals by David Eugene Smith and was published in 1911 to, as mentioned in the preface of the book, "bring together the fragmentary narrations and to set forth the general problem of the origin and development of these numerals."
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