PREFACE

Judging it to be of no small importance, I decided that I must prepare other aids for my edition. Having found mention of a certain letter in the catalog by Bandini Angelo Maria Bandini was an 18th-century librarian famous for cataloging the Laurentian Library in Florence. as being preserved in Florence ¹, I requested a copy. This was very kindly sent to me by the most learned and skilled Vitelli, at the request of my renowned friend H. Omont. I both give and owe Vitelli my greatest thanks.

It will be clear enough what that letter contributes to the history of mathematics, but a few things should perhaps be noted regardless. Anyone who knows Psellus Michael Psellus was an 11th-century Byzantine scholar and statesman. or has seen, for example, that he silently compiled the Measures of Heron (see below, pages 39, line 16 to 41, line 20) and was not at all bothered by the very serious errors which even the Paris manuscripts are full of ², will not doubt one thing. Everything reported at the beginning of the letter regarding Diophantus, Anatolius, and the "Egyptian analytical art" was taken from a manuscript of Diophantus that contained a fairly extensive and certainly ancient commentary. I may be permitted to believe that this was the same commentary that Hypatia had composed.

Moreover, to omit other matters, a very serious false reading is revealed: the word irrational original: "ἄλογος" (alogos) instead of indeterminate original: "ἀόριστον" (aoriston), used by Diophantus to refer to an unknown quantity or variable in the text of Diophantus (Volume I, 6, 4; compare Volume II, 37, 12 and 38, 2, etc.). The word irrational was written in the margin as part of a system for naming mathematical powers according to Anatolius. It referred to the word square-cube original: "δυναμόκυβος" (dynamokybos), representing the fifth power or $x^5$. The scribe who copied the original source of the more recent manuscripts believed that irrational should be substituted for the word indeterminate. This confusion...

The manuscript Laurentianus LVIII, 29 is also assigned to the 14th century.
As can be recognized by comparing the critical apparatus apparatus: the gathered notes and variant readings used by an editor to reconstruct an original text of Hultsch.