Nichomachus of Gerasa - Mathematics and the Liberal Arts

Nichomachus of Gerasa - Mathematics and the Liberal Arts

To expand search, see The Pythagoreans. Laterally related topics: The Pentagram and Hippasus of Metapontum.

The Mathematics and the Liberal Arts pages are intended to be a resource for student research projects and for teachers interested in using the history of mathematics in their courses. Many pages focus on ethnomathematics and in the connections between mathematics and other disciplines. The notes in these pages are intended as much to evoke ideas as to indicate what the books and articles are about. They are not intended as reviews. However, some items have been reviewed in Mathematical Reviews, published by The American Mathematical Society. When the mathematical review (MR) number and reviewer are known to the author of these pages, they are given as part of the bibliographic citation. Subscribing institutions can access the more recent MR reviews online through MathSciNet.


Schrader, Dorothy V. De arithmetica, Book I, of Boethius. Mathematics Teacher 61 (1968), 615--28.

Paraphrases Book I of Boethius' De arithmetica, which is in turn based on the Arithmetica of Nichomachus. This book is somewhere between simple arithmetic and elementary number theory, but develops the subjects quite differently than we do today. Boethius begins what we might think of as modular arithmetic (even and odd, and later evenly-even, evenly-odd, oddly-even), but the classification of numbers and parts of numbers soon acquires an unexpected complexity. The article gives an excellent introduction to the character of Medieval arithmetic/number theory. Reprinted in Swetz, Frank J., From Five Fingers to Infinity. Closely related topics: Boethius (Ancius Manlius Torquatus Severinus Boetius), Arithmetic, and Number Theory.

Make comment on this entry


Make comment on this category

Make comment on this project