Geometry and arithmetic in the medieval traditions of Euclid's \textit{Elements}: a view from Book II (Q376055)

In [ibid. 15, 67--114 (1975; Zbl 0325.01002)], \textit{S. Unguru} unleashed a major and rather acrimonious dispute in the history of mathematics by stating, among several other claims, that the `geometric algebra' that mathematicians turned historians from Zeuthen to van der Waerden had seen in Book II of Euclid's \textit{Elements}, as well as in other Books of the \textit{Elements} and in other works of ancient Greek mathematicians, was a distortion of the historical record, and had to be abandoned, as there was no `algebra' to be found, disguised or undisguised, in any Greek geometrical treatise. The paper received three dispassionate rebuttals, one from the main subject of the attack, \textit{B. L. van der Waerden} [ibid. 15 , 199--210 (1976; Zbl 0335.01002)], and two from mathematicians who were not the target of the ``need to rewrite'', as they had not published anything on ancient Greek mathematics, \textit{H. Freudenthal} [ibid. 16, 189--200 (1976; Zbl 0357.01003)] and \textit{A. Weil} [ibid. 19, 91--93 (1978; Zbl 0393.01001)]. \textit{S. Unguru} wrote a few more papers in the same polemic vein [Isis 70, 555--564 (1979; Zbl 0424.01003); with \textit{D. E. Rowe}, Libertas Math. 1, 1--49 (1981; Zbl 0475.01002); ibid. 2, 1--62 (1982; Zbl 0504.01002)]. Later, \textit{K. Saito} [Hist. Sci. 28, 31--60 (1985; Zbl 0582.01002)] and \textit{C. M. Taisbak} [Centaurus 38, No. 2--3, 122--139 (1996; Zbl 0853.01001)] provided interpretations that attempted to make sense of Book II in a purely geometric context (as useful for Euclid's \textit{Conic elements}) and of Proposition 86 from Euclid's \textit{Data}. Aspects of the diverging views were re-considered by \textit{J. Høyrup} [Hist. Math. 31, No. 2, 129--147 (2004; Zbl 1063.01024)]. On its surface the dispute appeared to have been one more example confirming Lord Mansfield's dictum that ``most of the disputes of the world arise from words'', for it seemed that it stemmed from divergent understandings of the meaning of ``algebra''. In reality, and Høyrup indicates it without mentioning Spengler in the paper cited above, the dispute is about something altogether different, namely whether a historian should look at mathematics itself as one endeavor evolving in time, or whether mathematics is inseparably bound up with the culture it appears in, to put it in Oswald Spengler's words in the first chapter of his \textit{Der Untergang des Abendlandes}, ``Jede Kultur hat eine eigene Mathematik.'' For \textit{B. Artmann} [Apeiron 24, No. 4, 1--47 (1992; Zbl 0925.01006)], the dispute originates in the difference in the training of philologists and mathematicians: ``Mathematicians tend to stress isomorphisms: they like to see the same structure in different guises; by contrast a philologist puts great value on expression and literary form. Mathematicians are accustomed to separating the content of a proposition from its form of expression, whereas philologists are likely to stress the particularity of different forms of expression.'' Unguru's point of view has won, being today part of ``normal science''. This has not happened by winning an argument with the old school of historians of mathematics, but rather the way most disputes are resolved, in Max Planck's words: ``Eine neue wissenschaftliche Wahrheit pflegt sich nicht in der Weise durchzusetzen, daß ihre Gegner überzeugt werden und sich als belehrt erklären, sondern vielmehr dadurch, daß ihre Gegner allmählich aussterben und daß die heranwachsende Generation von vornherein mit der Wahrheit vertraut gemacht ist.'' Indeed, in the meantime, the history of mathematics has undergone a professionalisation, the historian of mathematics is no longer a mathematician with a distinguished research career, but tends to be a trained historian of mathematics, with a strong emphasis on what Artmann called the philological aspects, the literary form. In the paper under review, Leo Corry proposes a serious historical examination of how the material in Book II of Euclid's \textit{Elements} came to be viewed in an algebraic light over centuries of transmission, aimed to ``identify those mathematical ideas \textit{not} originally found in Euclid's text and that were gradually incorporated into interpretations of it or even into the edited versions of the text itself.'' (p.\ 639) The journey leads us from the original text of Book II to Heron's commentary, to Al-Khwārizmī and Abū-Kāmil, to Thābit ibn Qurra (offering, among others, a context for Thābit's position, whose statement ``that the solution of the three types of quadratic equations according to `the Algebra people' is equivalent to the `Application of areas with excess or defect' as presented by Euclid'' was used by van der Waerden (on page 205 of the paper cited above) to defend `geometric algebra'), to Al-Nayrīzī's commentary, to the Latin medieval translations (Boethius, Hermann of Carinthia, Gerard of Cremona, Adelard of Bath, Robert of Chester), to the Jewish medieval scholar Abraham Bar-Ḥiyya, the \textit{Liber Mahameleth} (``a text on commercial arithmetic, presumably written in or near Toledo around 1143--1153''), to Fibonacci, to Jordanus Nemorarius, to the 13th century Latin version of Euclid's \textit{Elements} due to Campanus of Novara, ``completed sometime between 1255 and 1259'', a ``text that dominated European mathematics until the sixteenth century'', and in which the results from Book II ``were reincorporated into the arithmetic books of the [\textit{Elements}],'' in particular into Book IX (``the most significant milestones of this historical journey, given the decisive influence of Campanus in the process of transmission of the \textit{Elements} to the printed world of the European renaissance and its subsequent dissemination'' (p.\ 692)), to Levy Ben Gerson, also known as Gersonides, to end at Barlaam de Seminara (ca.\ 1290--1348). In short, a particularly valuable contribution to a fundamental issue in the history (and perhaps philosophy) of mathematics, regarding the relationship between geometry and arithmetic (or algebra).