On the arithmetical quadrature of the circle, the ellipse and the hyperbola. A corollary is a trigonometry without tables. Edited and with an epilogue by Eberhard Knobloch. Dual German-Latin text. Translated from the Latin by Otto Hamborg (Q342610)

It has long become a kind of folklore that Leibniz had no clear concept of infinitesimal quantities. Surely, he used different explanations in his correspondence according to the intellectual abilities he suspected in his correspondents but it was unknown until the year 1993 that Leibniz had indeed a very clear vision of infinitesimals which can compete with the rigorous definitions given in the second half of the 19th century. In 1993, the editor published the transcription of Leibniz's long forgotten manuscript \textit{De quadratura arithmetica} in the Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, see [Zbl 0919.01016]. The transcription is in Latin, of course, which hindered the reception of this most important mathematical work of Leibniz. In 2004, a French translation was published [Zbl 1315.01068], but a German translation was only presented in 2007 by Otto Hamborg who presented his translation on his homepage which might have hindered the reception in the German-speaking world. The present book now presents for the first time a Latin-German edition of this important manuscript where the German translation is the one by Hamborg. The editor has commented the work and added an epilogue in which he describes the history of the origins and the transmission of this work and gives a detailed analysis of the content. \textit{De quadratura arithmetica} was written by Leibniz while he lived in Paris. It developed from a series of manuscripts and the final version, presented here, stems from the autumn of 1676. The author clearly had pedagogical ideas in mind so that the manuscript is the longest mathematical manuscript known to be of Leibniz's hand. Since Leibniz had to leave Paris in October 1676 he left the manuscript there and asked his friend Soudry to print it in Paris. However, Soudry died 1678 and the manuscript was sent to Hanover where Leibniz residet, but the parcel got lost. Leibniz meanwhile had lost his interest in publishing the work, although he still worked on it while in Hanover. The final version hence went into the Leibniz Library in Hanover after Leibniz's death and was not recovered before 1934 when Lucie Scholz published a short excerpt in the context of her PhD thesis. It rested there until 1993 the editor excavated it. The manuscript contains a full description of Leibniz's infinitesimal geometry and hence comprises a full view of what Leibniz really had in mind. In the first section, Leibniz gives a thorough description of the foundations of his calculus. In Theorem 6, he gives a subtle (spinosissima) and rigorous foundation of his method of quadrature. In this theorem, Leibniz defines an infinitesimal quantity as one being smaller than \textit{any given} quantity. This is as rigorous and modern as a Weierstrassian definition. Leibniz does not say that an infinitesimal quantity is smaller than any positive number (which would render the quantity to be zero), but he has our modern perception in mind: given any positive \(\varepsilon\), we can return a smaller quantity. In this sense, Theorem 6 is the rigorous foundation of the Riemannian integral. The second section consists of applications of the theorems of the first section to particular curves like the cycloid. In the third section, Leibniz treats infinite series, the series of the arcus tangens, his arithmetic quadrature of the circle (the famous \(\pi/4\)-series) and series's for the logarithm. The present book marks a true milestone in the understanding of Leibniz's foundations of his calculus and reveals how `modern' Leibniz's thinking really was. Now, in 2016, 340 years after the manuscript was written, the German-speaking world can fully appreciate Leibniz's infinitesimal geometry thanks to the editor and Otto Hamborg.