Complete Works of Diophantus of Alexandria, Vol. 1

...compiled by Planudes original: "Planude compilatum." Maximus Planudes was a 13th century Byzantine scholar who introduced Hindu-Arabic numerals to the East ¹). It should also be mentioned that in that small work, the shapes of the numbers are those which the Italians were using at that time; Planudes, on the other hand, displayed Persian number signs as everyone knows.

Regarding what is said at the end of that Indian Calculation about extracting square roots, I believe the writer of the book intended to complete it. He was a certain monk collecting various mathematical pieces according to his own preference. Perhaps he excerpted a broken note from a certain Diophantine manuscript and added a false rule from it; the error is obvious, but there is no reason to suspect fraud.

2. In several manuscript copies of Ptolemy's Mathematical Composition original: "Compositionis mathematicae," the work more commonly known as the Almagest, those anonymous Introductory Remarks original Greek: Προλεγόμενα (Prolegomena) are found. Friedrich Hultsch added the beginning and the geometric part of these to his excellent edition of Pappus (preface to volume 3, pages 17–21 and 1138–1165). These were indeed attributed to Pappus by the author of the catalog placed before the Vatican Greek manuscript 184. On the other hand, the name of Diophantus was prefixed to them in the 14th century Venetian manuscript 303, to say nothing of the more recent 17th century Oxford manuscript, Bodleian Canonici 32. Both attributions are false; for although the author of the Introductory Remarks ²) certainly compiled Pappus along with Theon and others (but not Diophantus), he mentioned Syrianus. Therefore, he did not live before the end of the fifth or the beginning of the sixth century.

1. In the very well known work which Gerhardt published in Greek: The Calculation Book of Maximus Planudes, Halle, Schmidt, 1865.

2. I have explained elsewhere why it can be conjectured that Heliodorus of Alexandria, the son of Hermias and brother of Ammonius, was the author of the Introductory Remarks (Bulletin of Mathematical Sciences, January 1894, and Journal for Mathematics and Physics, under the title: A Fragment of the Metrics of Heron).