ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Words, Numbers, and Symbols: Vernacular Arithmetic and the Digital Turn

• In Event: Global Knowledge(s): From Mono- to Plurilingual Research at the Intersection of Digital Humanities/AI, Language Corpora, and the Making of Scientific Knowledge

English Abstract

Exploring the digitization of European arithmetic treatises, this paper traces how late medieval and early modern mathematics emerged and advanced from its Latin templates, thereby focusing on the development of vernacular jargons diagrams, and symbolic notation as first steps for the emergence of mathematics as a formal language. It shows how plurilingualism extended beyond language into semiotic systems, and how digital encoding can make visible the historical coexistence of verbal and numerical reasoning.

Author

• Michaela Wiesinger