Negative values in Diophant? Parts I, II. (Q882498)

The author argues convincingly against two remarks made by \textit{N. Schappacher} [Math. Semesterber. 45, No. 2, 141--156 (1998; Zbl 0936.11005)] saying that (i) Diophant may well have been a ``collective mathematician'' like Bourbaki, and (ii) that negative quantities did not appear in Diophant's texts. Ad (i) the author's argument is that up to now nobody has given, besides pure speculations, any convincing argument against the originality of Diophant's work. Concerning (ii) the author gives detailed analyses which show in a lot of examples, particularly collected in Part 2 of the paper, that Diophant not only squares in his calculations in the usual way differences which -- almost obviously -- have a subtrahend which is larger than their minuend, but explains that Diophant also has a specific name for these negative quantities. So even if he did not accept them as numbers, Diophant used negative quantities, and has surely been aware of this fact. The paper ends with a section which surveys how the topic ``Diophant and the negative numbers'' has been dealt with by translators and commentators from the first one in medieval times up to now.