Karine Chemla Libri

Exploring the intricate relationship between texts and scholarly practices, the book delves into how texts serve both as tools for inquiry and as mediums for knowledge exchange among scholars. It emphasizes the historical context of texts, highlighting their evolution and the influence of available technologies on their production and organization. Additionally, it examines how practitioners in various sciences create and adapt textual resources, utilizing diverse literary techniques and genres to enrich their research and engage with the textual cultures of their professional communities.

This radical, profoundly scholarly book explores the purposes and nature of proof in a range of historical settings. It overturns the view that the first mathematical proofs were in Greek geometry and rested on the logical insights of Aristotle by showing how much of that view is an artefact of nineteenth-century historical scholarship. It documents the existence of proofs in ancient mathematical writings about numbers and shows that practitioners of mathematics in Mesopotamian, Chinese and Indian cultures knew how to prove the correctness of algorithms, which are much more prominent outside the limited range of surviving classical Greek texts that historians have taken as the paradigm of ancient mathematics. It opens the way to providing the first comprehensive, textually-based history of proof.