Diophantus of Alexandria

born sometime between AD 201 and 215; died aged 84 sometime between AD 285 and 299)
called "the father of algebra", was an Alexandrian Greek mathematician and the author of a series of
books called Arithmetica, many of which are now lost.

In the 3rd Century AD, Diophantus of Alexandria was the first to recognize fractions as numbers, and is
considered an early innovator in the field of what would later become known as algebra. He applied
himself to some quite complex algebraic problems, including what is now known as Diophantine
Analysis, which deals with finding integer solutions to kinds of problems that lead to equations in several
unknowns (Diophantine equations). Diophantus Arithmetica, a collection of problems giving
numerical solutions of both determinate and indeterminate equations, was the most prominent work on
algebra in all Greek mathematics, and his problems exercised the minds of many of the world's best
mathematicians for much of the next two millennia.
But Alexandria was not the only centre of learning in the Hellenistic Greek empire. Mention should also
be made of Apollonius of Perga (a city in modern-day southern Turkey) whose late 3rd Century BC work
on geometry (and, in particular, on conics and conic sections) was very influential on later European
mathematicians. It was Apollonius who gave the ellipse, the parabola, and the hyperbola the names by
which we know them, and showed how they could be derived from different sections through a cone.
Biography[edit]
Little is known about the life of Diophantus. He lived in Alexandria, Egypt, probably from between AD
200 and 214 to 284 or 298. Much of our knowledge of the life of Diophantus is derived from a 5th-
century Greek anthology of number games and puzzles created by Metrodorus. One of the problems
(sometimes called his epitaph) states:

'Here lies Diophantus,' the wonder behold.
Through art algebraic, the stone tells how old:
'God gave him his boyhood one-sixth of his life,
One twelfth more as youth while whiskers grew rife;
And then yet one-seventh ere marriage begun;
In five years there came a bouncing new son.
Alas, the dear child of master and sage
After attaining half the measure of his father's life chill fate took him. After consoling his fate by the
science of numbers for four years, he ended his life.'
This puzzle implies that Diophantus' age x can be expressed as

x = \frac{x}{6} + \frac{x}{12} + \frac{x}{7} + 5 + \frac{x}{2} + 4
which gives x a value of 84 years. However, the accuracy of the information cannot be independently
confirmed.

In popular culture, this puzzle was the Puzzle No.142 in Professor Layton and Pandora's Box as one of
the hardest solving puzzles in the game, which needed to be unlocked by solving other puzzles first.

Arithmetica[edit]
See also: Arithmetica
The Arithmetica is the major work of Diophantus and the most prominent work on algebra in Greek
mathematics. It is a collection of problems giving numerical solutions of both determinate and
indeterminate equations. Of the original thirteen books of which Arithmetica consisted only six have
survived, though there are some who believe that four Arab books discovered in 1968 are also by
Diophantus.[6] Some Diophantine problems from Arithmetica have been found in Arabic sources.

It should be mentioned here that Diophantus never used general methods in his solutions. Hermann
Hankel, renowned German mathematician made the following remark regarding Diophantus.

Our author (Diophantos) not the slightest trace of a general, comprehensive method is discernible;
each problem calls for some special method which refuses to work even for the most closely related
problems. For this reason it is difficult for the modern scholar to solve the 101st problem even after
having studied 100 of Diophantoss solutions *7+*dubious discuss]

History[edit]
Like many other Greek mathematical treatises, Diophantus was forgotten in Western Europe during the
so-called Dark Ages, since the study of ancient Greek, and literacy in general, had greatly declined. The
portion of the Greek Arithmetica that survived, however, was, like all ancient Greek texts transmitted to
the early modern world, copied by, and thus known to, medieval Byzantine scholars. In addition, some
portion of the Arithmetica probably survived in the Arab tradition (see above). In 1463 German
mathematician Regiomontanus wrote:

No one has yet translated from the Greek into Latin the thirteen books of Diophantus, in which the very
flower of the whole of arithmetic lies hidden . . . .
Arithmetica was first translated from Greek into Latin by Bombelli in 1570, but the translation was never
published. However, Bombelli borrowed many of the problems for his own book Algebra. The editio
princeps of Arithmetica was published in 1575 by Xylander. The best known Latin translation of
Arithmetica was made by Bachet in 1621 and became the first Latin edition that was widely available.
Pierre de Fermat owned a copy, studied it, and made notes in the margins.

Margin-writing by Fermat and Chortasmenos[edit]


Problem II.8 in the Arithmetica (edition of 1670), annotated with Fermat's comment which became
Fermat's Last Theorem.
The 1621 edition of Arithmetica by Bachet gained fame after Pierre de Fermat wrote his famous "Last
Theorem" in the margins of his copy:

If an integer n is greater than 2, then a^n + b^n = c^n has no solutions in non-zero integers a, b, and c. I
have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Fermat's proof was never found, and the problem of finding a proof for the theorem went unsolved for
centuries. A proof was finally found in 1994 by Andrew Wiles after working on it for seven years. It is
believed that Fermat did not actually have the proof he claimed to have. Although the original copy in
which Fermat wrote this is lost today, Fermat's son edited the next edition of Diophantus, published in
1670. Even though the text is otherwise inferior to the 1621 edition, Fermat's annotationsincluding
the "Last Theorem"were printed in this version.

Fermat was not the first mathematician so moved to write in his own marginal notes to Diophantus; the
Byzantine scholar John Chortasmenos (13701437) had written "Thy soul, Diophantus, be with Satan
because of the difficulty of your theorems" next to the same problem[citation needed].