American attempts to solve Newton's pasturage problem

Abstract

Frederick Emerson's North American Arithmetic contained a “pasturage problem” which baffled his compatriots. Actually, as the Americans discovered forty-two years later, this problem was taken from Isaac Newton's Arithmetica Universalis. The history of this problem illuminates the tradition of standard artificial exercises, the isolation of American mathematics, a chain of mathematical and historical plagiarisms, and changing patterns of arithmetical reasoning.