The Growth of Algebraic Thought in Sixteenth-Century Europe
This chapter traces the growth of algebraic thought in Europe during the sixteenth century. Equations of the third and fourth degrees sparked quite a few algebraic fireworks in the first half of the century. Their solutions marked the first major European advances beyond the algebra contained in Fibonacci's thirteenth-century Liber abbaci. By the end of the century, algebraic thought—through work on the solutions of the cubics and quartics but, more especially, through work aimed at better contextualizing and at unifying those earlier sixteenth-century advances—had grown significantly beyond the body of knowledge codified in Luca Pacioli's fifteenth-century compendium, the Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni, e proportionalita. Algebra during this period was evolving in interesting ways.