Nicomachus: Introduction to Arithmetic

Nicomachus of Gerasa, Martin Luther D'Ooge (T) · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 328 pages

A scanned facsimile of Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic, translated by Martin Luther D'Ooge with studies in Greek arithmetic by Frank Egleston Robbins and Louis Charles Karpinski, published as Volume XVI of the University of Michigan Humanistic Series by the Macmillan Company in 1926. Like King's Gnostics it is a photographic reproduction of the printed book rather than a Philaletheians-set document, and carries no embedded properties. At 245 MB it is by a wide margin the largest file in the library.

The volume is in three parts, and only the middle one is Nicomachus himself. Part I, Studies in Greek Mathematics, runs to twelve chapters covering the sources of Greek mathematics, the development of Greek arithmetic before Nicomachus, the mathematical content of the Greek Mathematica, Greek arithmetical notation, the life and the works of Nicomachus, his philosophy and his philosophy of number, his translators and commentators, his successors, the manuscripts and text of the Introduction, and his language and style. Part II is the translation itself, in two books. Part III supplies supplementary aids — extensions of a theorem of Nicomachus, a glossary of Greek terms, a select bibliography and an index. The opening chapter states the distinction that makes the book relevant to this section: that arithmetic is associated by modern readers with the art of computation, whereas for the Greeks after Pythagoras it was primarily a philosophical study with no necessary connection to practical affairs — the arithmetic of business having a separate name, λογιστική, of which no Greek treatise survives, the philosophers apparently considering it beneath their dignity.

Read the full text (PDF, 245.0 MB, 328 pages)