Abacus Schools. The invention of a language
Giovanni PATRIARCA
Original title: Escuelas de ábaco. La invención de un lenguaje
Published in Mirabilia Journal
Keywords: Abacus Schools, Accounting, Economic History, History of Education, History of Mathematics, Linguistic Evolution.
Abacus schools are fundamental for mathematical, geometric and economic literacy as well as for the scientific development of these disciplines with their own sectorial language and style. The Abacus treatises constitute the basis of a solid administrative, accounting and commercial training. In a fruitful exchange with all expressions of society, they become the main engine for the consolidation of a new linguistic koiné.
Playing “Pythagoras” in Padua and Florence: a Sixteenth-Century Rithmomachia manuscript at the University of Pennsylvania
Ann E. MOYER
Published in Games from Antiquity to Baroque
Keywords: Florence, History of Education, History of Mathematics, Padua, Pythagoreanism, Rithmomachia, Universities.
A manuscript in the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries (UPenn LJS 232) contains a manual for the medieval game rithmomachia by Carlo di Ruberto Strozzi, preceded by a brief treatise on proportion by Benedetto Varchi, both in vernacular; they were inspired by the Latin publication of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples. An examination of the treatise and the circle of learned Florentines involved in its production offer an example both of the ways that the game spread in European university cultures, and the limits of interest in the Boethian mathematics of proportion that the game was intended to exercise.
