13 Facts About Diophantus

Diophantus of Alexandria was an Alexandrian mathematician, who was the author of a series of books called Arithmetica, many of which are now lost.

Diophantus coined the term pa??s?t?? to refer to an approximate equality.

Diophantus was the first Greek mathematician who recognized fractions as numbers; thus he allowed positive rational numbers for the coefficients and solutions.

Diophantus lived in Alexandria, Egypt, during the Roman era, 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.

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Diophantus wrote several other books besides Arithmetica, but very few of them have survived.

Diophantus himself refers to a work which consists of a collection of lemmas called The Porisms, but this book is entirely lost.

Diophantus is known to have written on polygonal numbers, a topic of great interest to Pythagoras and Pythagoreans.

Diophantus' work created a foundation for work on algebra and in fact much of advanced mathematics is based on algebra.

Diophantus was always satisfied with a rational solution and did not require a whole number which means he accepted fractions as solutions to his problems.

Diophantus made important advances in mathematical notation, becoming the first person known to use algebraic notation and symbolism.

Diophantus introduced an algebraic symbolism that used an abridged notation for frequently occurring operations, and an abbreviation for the unknown and for the powers of the unknown.

Some limitations of Diophantus' notation are that he only had notation for one unknown and, when problems involved more than a single unknown, Diophantus was reduced to expressing "first unknown", "second unknown", etc.