Hypatia of Alexandria · Mathematics
Hypatia’s commentary on the <em>Arithmetica</em> of Diophantus - what a ‘Diophantine problem’ is (whole-number and fractional solutions to equations), the first stirrings of symbolic algebra, and how the edition she and her school produced helped the most influential text in the history of number theory survive.
You learned that Diophantus’s Arithmetica introduced ‘syncopated’ algebra (a symbol for the unknown and its powers) and posed indeterminate problems seeking rational solutions, that Hypatia wrote a commentary on it, and that the text later inspired Fermat. Explain what a Diophantine problem is and wh…
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