A history of Greek mathematics - Wilbourhall.org

454 DIOPHANTUS OF ALEXANDRIA
Greek. In an ratio delivered at the end of: 1463 as an
introduction to a course of lectures on astronomy. which he
gave at Padua in 1403-4 he observed: 'No one has yet
translated from the Greek into Latin the fine thirteen Books
of Diophantus, in which the very flower of the whole of
arithmetic lies hid, the ars rei et census which to-day they
call by the Arabic name of Algebra.'
February 5,
Again, in a letter dated
1464, to Bianchini, he writes that he has found at
Venice ' Diofantus, a Greek arithmetician who has not yet
been translated into Latin '.
Rafael Bombelli was the first to
find a manuscript in the Vatican and to conceive the idea of
publishing the work; this was towards 1570, and, with
Antonio Maria Pazzi, he translated five Books out of the
seven into which the manuscript was divided. The translation
was not published, but Bombelli took all the problems of the
first four Books and some of those of the fifth and embodied
them in his Algebra (1572), interspersing them with his own
problems.
The next writer on Diophantus was Wilhelm Holzmann,
who called himself Xylander, and who with extraordinary
industry and care produced a very meritorious Latin translation
with commentary (1575).
Xylander was an enthusiast
for Diophantus, and his preface and notes are often delightful
reading. Unfortunately the book is now very rare. The
standard edition of Diophantus till recent years was that of
Bachet, who in 1621 published for the first time the Greek
text with Latin translation and notes. A second edition
(1670) was carelessly printed and is untrustworthy as regards
the text ; on the other hand it contained the epoch-making
notes of Fermat ; the editor was S. Fermat, his son. The
great blot on the work of Bachet is his attitude to Xylander,
to whose translation he owed more than he was willing to
avow. Unfortunately neither Bachet nor Xylander was able
to use the best manuscripts ; that used by Bachet was Parisinus
2379 (of the middle of the sixteenth century), with the help
of a transcription of part of a Vatican MS. (Vat. gr. 304 of
the sixteenth century), while Xylander's manuscript was the
Wolfenbuttel MS. Guelferbytanus Gudianus 1 (fifteenth century).
The best and most ancient manuscript is that of
Madrid (Matritensis 48 of the thirteenth century) which was