JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I found the following while strolling through a volume of teh Edinburgh Review for 1811. The ER was an excellent “magazine, with much in common with the New York Review of Books and The Times literary Supplement–it was meant for a mass audience of careful readers, and performed critical reviews and examinations of newly-published major works. Analysis was done on 40-60 books per year, spread out over about a thousand pages, so there was a lot of space dedicated to each work.  What I’m sharing here is the mathematician Jean-Baptiste Delambre’s (1749-1822) contribution to Francois Peyrard’s (1760-1822) Oeuvres d’Archimède, trad. littéralement, avec un commentaire, par F. Peyrard,…. suivies d’un Mémoire du traducteur sur un nouveau miroir ardent. et d’un autre Mémoire de M. Delambre sur l’arithmétique des grecs... Delambre’s contribution, “De l’Arithmetique des Grecs”,  ran on pp 569-601 in this 1058pp work, and so far as I can find has not been translated. The review occupies pp 185-214 in this volume of the ER, and is in English, so I thought there may be some history/maths folks out there who would like to read it. The image at left is from the copy here; the full text link is provided by Google Books.  

Full text:  https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b2972985;view=2up;seq=196  (The text clears up with a one-level zoom.)