Timeline for Were decimal fractions known in Europe before Stevin?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| Oct 29, 2019 at 10:49 | comment | added | Chrystomath | Follow up: The 1558 version did not have Book 17. It was the second edition in 1589 that had it. Therefore one cannot say whether della Porta got the idea from Stevin or not. | |
| Oct 26, 2019 at 22:42 | answer | added | Conifold | timeline score: 1 | |
| Oct 26, 2019 at 21:53 | history | edited | Conifold | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 26, 2019 at 13:38 | comment | added | Gerald Edgar | OK, the decimal system was in use already. But only for calculations involving integers. Here we are talking about an extended use of this system with fractional places for tenths, hundredths and so on. (Of course there were previous notations with place value 1/60 and 1/(60)^2 and so on: degrees minutes seconds). | |
| Oct 26, 2019 at 10:31 | comment | added | Chrystomath | My question is about the decimal point. The Wikipedia article nowhere mentions della Porta, or Stevin for that matter! | |
| Oct 26, 2019 at 10:27 | history | edited | Chrystomath | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 26, 2019 at 10:19 | comment | added | Conifold | Are you asking about inventing decimals or notational conventions for them? Using a point hardly counts as "invention", and Wikipedia already has an article on the history of the decimal separator. | |
| Oct 26, 2019 at 10:06 | comment | added | Chrystomath | What I meant is the decimal system with decimal point. Can you please give the page where Fibonacci uses a decimal point? As far as I can tell he used fractions as in $\frac{1}{10}\frac{2}{10}\frac{3}{10}4$ to represent our $4.321$. | |
| Oct 26, 2019 at 7:42 | comment | added | Conifold | No, it is not "commonly held". Stevin promoted decimals in Europe, and he was influential. But he did not invent them, nor even claimed to do so. They were imported to Europe from Islamic Middle East long before Stevin, and described in Fibonacci's Liber Abaci back in 1202, for example. What Stevin did pioneer was identifying irrationals with infinite decimal fractions and treating them as "proper" numbers, contrary to the Greek tradition, see How were irrational numbers accepted by mathematicians? | |
| Oct 26, 2019 at 5:38 | history | asked | Chrystomath | CC BY-SA 4.0 |