The Greate Invention of Algebra: Thomas Harriot's Treatise on equations

This book focuses on one hundred and forty of Harriot’s manuscript pages, those concerned with the structure and solution of equations. The original material has been carefully ordered, translated, and annotated to provide the first complete edition of his work on this subject, and an extended introduction provides the reader with a lucid background to the work and explains its contents. Illustrations from the manuscripts provide fascinating reference material. The appendix discusses correlations between Harriot’s manuscripts and the texts of his contemporaries Viète, Warner, and Torporley.

The clear and concise exposition makes this an excellent reference volume for historians of mathematics and those interested in the history of science. This is an important new resource for understanding the development of algebra in seventeenth-century England.