Jacopo da Firenze's \textit{Tractatus algorismi} and early Italian abbacus culture (Q885257)

Italian abbacus culture is a chapter of the Later Middle Ages history of mathematics, wrongly believed a minor one for its being supposed only a simplified and vernacular version of the great Leonardo Fibonacci's ``Liber Abaci''. It belonged to the ancient practical tradition and was widespread most of all in the commercial Italian cities as Florence, written in vernacular, taught to children from families of the new urban professions, as merchants or craftsmen. Historically it was the bridge between the imported Islamic mathematics (first and foremost numerical algorithms and algebra) and the Renaissance mathematics, but this tradition is not well known because so far its sources have been edited in medieval Italian vernacular. This beautiful book includes a critical edition and an English translation of a Vatican Manuscript of Jacopo da Firenze's ``Tractatus Algorismi'', dated 1307, and a semicritical edition of two other manuscripts of the same book. In addition the book outlines a synthetical but enlightening analysis of the whole Italian abbacus culture, underlining its progress with respect to al-Khwarizmi and tracing the origin of a relevant fragment of the abbacus literature of the 14-th century not to Fibonacci's books but back to the Catalan-Provencal area (named the ``area?'' by the author), where he places the `root' of a stemma of this literature.