Some distributivity-like results in the medieval arithmetic of Jordanus Nemorarius and Campanus de Novara (Q309808)

The author discusses the contributions of two famous 13th-century European authors, Jordanus Nemorarius and Campanus de Novara, to the understanding and development of the distributivity property of arithmetic. Before these two, Euclid gave in his \textit{Elements} (Books II and VII) results that can be interpreted as special cases of the distributivity property. After discussing these results, the author also discusses Heron's alternative proofs of Euclid's results, which we know through al-Nayrīzī's texts and which also include arithmetical equivalents. The main part of the paper describes two important contributions from 13th-century Europe. One is contained in Jordanus' \textit{Arithmetica}, a ``pioneering attempt to provide systematic foundations for the arithmetic of the natural numbers seen as an autonomous field of knowledge'' (quoted from the article under discussion). Jordanus tries to found arithmetic without reference to geometry and formulates several arithmetical laws related to distributivity. On the other hand, Campanus published a Latin version of the \textit{Elements} with original own additions and comments, which include several new distributivity-like formulations. This article gives a thorough discussion of the two important medieval contributions to the development of arithmetics, in their full historical context, including the relations between the formulations and intentions of the four mentioned authors. Numerous details give a full and detailed insight into the early development of the fundamental arithmetical law of distributivity.