The Algebraic Art of Discourse Algebraic Dispositio, Invention and Imitation in Sixteenth-Century France

Abstract

This paper is part of a research project devoted to inquiring into the connections between humanist rhetoric, dialectics and the teaching of the liberal arts on the one hand and the developments occurring in sixteenth-century algebra on the other. In this larger context, we have found that, especially in France, symbolic algebra as we know it grew out of mathematics within humanistic culture, and particularly out the interaction between mathematics and the disciplines of the text. This is what transformed algebra after its importation from Italy (and the German countries), so that it became what we call symbolic algebra.|The paper discusses first the way in which the disciplines of the text modified the way of writing algebra. Secondly, it looks at how one sixteenth-century author theorized mathematical creation in "literary" terms, as invention within imitation. To look at sixteenth-century algebra in this way necessitates our own reflection on the relationship between innovation and tradition or, to use sixteenth-century terms, invention and imitation.