Overview

Mathematics in the Middle Ages was largely concerned with commenting on traditional texts, most notably the Elements of Euclid (fl. 300 B.C.). This work supplied both the vocabulary in which much mathematics was done and the kind of problems to whose solution mathematical effort was devoted. After the fall of Rome in 476, it took many centuries even for a complete text of Euclid to be available to mathematicians in western Europe. As a result, much of the mathematics that was being done could be called "philosophy of mathematics" and involved an investigation of the properties of the numbers that were the building blocks of mathematics in Euclid and elsewhere. Amid all this work (which resembles a kind of number mysticism), there were some techniques that could be incorporated in mathematics when it was less involved with issues...