This volume offers an English translation of all ten extant books of Diophantus of Alexandria-s Arithmetica, along with a comprehensive conceptual, historical, and mathematical commentary.
Before his work became the inspiration for the emerging field of number theory in the seventeenth century, Diophantus (ca. 3rd c. CE) was known primarily as an algebraist. This volume explains how his method of solving arithmetical problems agrees both conceptually and procedurally with the premodern algebra later practiced in Arabic, Latin, and European vernaculars, and how this algebra differs radically from the modern algebra initiated by Fran-s Vi- and Ren-escartes. It also discusses other surviving traces of ancient Greek algebra and follows the influence of the Arithmetica in medieval Islam, Byzantium, and the European Renaissance down to the 1621 publication of Claude-Gaspard Bachet-s edition. After the English translation the book provides a problem-by-problem commentar
