(Article I.13.) The “Unknown Heritage” – Trace of a Forgotten Locus of Mathematical Sophistication

Abstract

The “unknown heritage” is the name usually given to a problem type in whose archetype a father leaves to his first son 1 monetary unit and 1/n (n usually being 7 or 10) of what remains, to the second 2 units and 1/n of what remains, etc. In the end all sons get the same, and nothing remains. The earliest known occurrence is in Fibonacci’s Liber abbaci, which also contains a number of much more sophisticated versions, together with a partial algebraic solution for one of these and rules for all which do not follow from his algebraic calculation. The next time the problem turns up is in Planudes’s late 13th-c. Calculus according to the Indians, Called the Great. After that the simple problem type turns up regularly in Provencal, Italian and Byzantine sources. It seems never to appear in Arabic or Indian writings, although two Arabic texts (one from c. 1190) contain more regular problems where the number of shares is given; they are clearly derived from the type known from European and Byzantine works, not its source. The sophisticated versions turn up again in Barthelemy de Romans’ Compendy de la praticque des nombres (c. 1467) and, apparently inspired from there, in the appendix to Nicolas Chuquet’s Triparty (1484). Apart from a single trace in Cardano’s Practica arithmetice et mensurandi singularis, the sophisticated versions never surface again, but the simple version spreads for a while to German practical arithmetic and, more persistently, to French polite recreational mathematics. Close examination of the texts shows that Barthelemy cannot have drawn his familiarity with the sophisticated rules from Fibonacci. It also suggests that the simple version is originally either a classical, strictly Greek or Hellenistic, or a medieval Byzantine invention; and that the sophisticated versions must have been developed before Fibonacci within an environment (located in Byzantium, Provence, or possibly in Sicily?) of which all direct traces have been lost, but whose mathematical level must have been quite advanced. 〚An addendum drawing on new evidence argues that the invention was made in the 12th century in Al-Andalus.〛