I was curious about Bolyai's appendix itself and was intrigued to see it was originally in Latin (https://www.unesco.org/en/memory-world/janos-bolyai-appendix...). I'm not a math expert by any stretch (nor a historian of math) but I had thought that German had become the lingua franca of mathematics by that point. Does anyone know if Latin was still the default for math in 1832?
Hungary was under Austrian rule (German-speaking) which many disliked, including the lower nobility. Maybe this also played a role in preferring Latin over German.
I assumed so from the title and almost didn't check out the video when YouTube recommended it yesterday. Really glad I still did. As usual from Veritasium the video included a lot of interesting historical context that I had no idea about.
Wikipedia says "Elements is the oldest extant large-scale deductive treatment of mathematics."
There is a category for which we can count it as "the oldest"
The only older "important publications in math" Wikiepedia has are
* "Moscow Mathematical Papyrus" from 1850 BC. This is referred to as a manuscript rather than a "text" though.
* "Baudhayana Sulba Sutra" from 8th century BC. Which by all accounts seems to be actually a mass produced text with large reach. But also seems like these general don't contain proofs. and are more like a reference book than an explanation book.
So Elements is several hundred years behind the competition, but for a journalist to simplify "Oldest major math book that made an attempt at explaining the core fundamentals of how math works instead of just giving equations and examples" down to "oldest math text" feels fair enough.
As far as I can see, any older texts basically fall under "here is how the pythagorean theorem works" and not "here are the intrinsic laws that explain how math works, and thus why/how the pythagorean theorem works". The title is true for some definitions of "math text".
I think paleographers think of the text as an abstract object and manuscripts as approximations of it. E.g. you might have a couple hundred manuscripts (and other things like printings, etc) of Aristotle’s Physics, but the text is what you get after you identify and try to correct scribal errors.
whereas I think in common usage text is anything written and manuscript is a subset of document.
Although manuscript in pre-computer days generally meant something handwritten, nowadays I guess you can turn in a manuscript that was written on the computer so not exactly the same.
Veritasium has made a video defending their use of clickbait. They claim that the content is good enough that it justifies of misleading titles, and the titles are necessary to draw viewers.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 38.6 ms ] thread[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss#Writings
Wikipedia says "Elements is the oldest extant large-scale deductive treatment of mathematics."
There is a category for which we can count it as "the oldest"
The only older "important publications in math" Wikiepedia has are * "Moscow Mathematical Papyrus" from 1850 BC. This is referred to as a manuscript rather than a "text" though. * "Baudhayana Sulba Sutra" from 8th century BC. Which by all accounts seems to be actually a mass produced text with large reach. But also seems like these general don't contain proofs. and are more like a reference book than an explanation book.
So Elements is several hundred years behind the competition, but for a journalist to simplify "Oldest major math book that made an attempt at explaining the core fundamentals of how math works instead of just giving equations and examples" down to "oldest math text" feels fair enough.
As far as I can see, any older texts basically fall under "here is how the pythagorean theorem works" and not "here are the intrinsic laws that explain how math works, and thus why/how the pythagorean theorem works". The title is true for some definitions of "math text".
There's no difference. A manuscript is a written document. A text is a written document.
Wiktionary's definition page is something of a train wreck, but if you already know what to look for, the information is there:
> text (countable and uncountable, plural texts)
( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/text#English )
Of course one word cannot be "countable and uncountable". But your "text" is uncountable, and bisby's "text" is not.
Although manuscript in pre-computer days generally meant something handwritten, nowadays I guess you can turn in a manuscript that was written on the computer so not exactly the same.
If we define mathematics as, e.g. counting, it is much older.
(It's interesting that mathematics is commonly thought of today by most people as to do with numbers, yet Elements is geometry.)