A Comparative Study of the Early Treatises Introducing Into Europe the Hindu Art of Reckoning

About The Book : In any stuch of the development of human thought, emphasis is justly laid upon the periods of great discovery, while the centuries in which, through slow evolution, were built the foundations for those discoveries are passed over with a word. Such a period in the development of mathematics we find in the years of transition from the dark ages to the renaissance, when the introduction into Europe of a convenient numerical symbolism furnished one of the most useful tools for the great works of a Descartes or a Newton. Many manuscripts written during this period are among the treasures of the European libraries, and a bibliography of such works was begun by A. A. Bjornbo of Copenhagen, but his earl death prevented its completion, and the results of his research are still unpublished.These arithmetics have been read throughout, but since many of them are long and treat of a variety of subjects, it has been found necessary to limit the scope of this paper to a discussion of the fundamental operations upon integers. Accordingly, the various methods of performing the operations are described, and a comparison of them is made in order to ascertain to what extent the Latin works were derived from Arabic sources and which of the algorisms were most influential in determining the character of later treatises. About The Author : Suzan Benedict(1873-1942) was born in Norwalk, Ohio, the youngest of seven children of David De Forrest Benedict, MD and Harriott Melvina Benedict (née Deaver). Dr. Benedict had been a Union Surgeon in the American Civil War. After graduating high school in Norwalk, Suzan Benedict entered Smith College in 1891. She graduated in 1895 with a major in Chemistry and minors in Mathematics, German, and Physics, then returned to Norwalk and taught Mathematics until 1905, when she began graduate studies at Teacher's College, Columbia University. She received a M.A. in Mathematics from Columbia in 1906. The summers of 1911 through 1913 she resumed her graduate studies at the University of Michigan and in 1913–14 she took a leave of absence from Smith to finish her dissertation directed by Louis Charles Karpinski: “A Comparative Study of the Early Treatises Introducing into Europe the Hindu Art of Reckoning.” She received her PhD in 1914.Suzan returned to Smith as an associate professor after receiving her PhD. She was promoted to professor in 1921. From 1918 to 1928 she was Dean of Students and she served as chairman of the Mathematics department from 1928 to 1934.The Suzan R. Benedict Prize was established after her death by the college president and others at Smith College to be awarded to sophomores who had done exceptional work in differential and integral calculus.