The arithmetic master
Der Rechenmeister is the first novel by the engineer and writer Dieter Jörgensen, born in 1936, about the life of the mathematician Nicolo Tartaglia in Venice , from the time he arrived in the lagoon city to the loss of the famous competition with Lodovico Ferrari and Gerolamo Cardano in August 1548.
Tartaglia's character and life are described in a field of tension between a striving for recognition as a brilliant mathematician, his fear of strangers due to his stuttering and his love for the Venetian Jewess Sara Rossi and elaborated in numerous details by Dieter Jörgensen. Medieval Venice, which initially retained a relative independence from the Holy See in Rome and the Inquisition , but increasingly lost power and independence in armed conflicts, forms the historical context . A special topic is the situation of the Jews who, on the one hand, went about their lucrative business in the Venice ghetto and , on the other hand, had to fight for their continued existence as a community within the Serenissima .
The finale of the novel is determined by the famous dispute between Tartaglia and the doctor and mathematician Gerolamo Cardano and his student Lodovico Ferrari , which revolved around the fame of the discovery of the solution to cubic equations . In a dispute that was unique in the history of science until then , which was largely carried out publicly over thousands of leaflets distributed in numerous large cities, Tartaglia accused Cardano of having wrested the solution by means of an oath in order to publish it himself a few years later. Tartaglia himself - all too sure of his unique achievement - had refrained from publishing the solution in order to first create an Italian translation of the elements of Euclid and finally to publish his own solution as part of a major work (planned under the title Trattato ) to undertake.
A Dutch translation was published in 2001 under the title De rekenmeester .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Dieter Jörgensen, Der Rechenmeister , Rütten & Loening , Berlin 1999, ISBN 978-3352005558 ; Paperback: Aufbau-Taschenbuch-Verlag , Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3746620145
- ↑ Dieter Jörgensen, De rekenmeester , The Hague, 2001, ISBN 9-05501-722-1 .
Web links
- Friedrich Katscher, Boekbespreking De rekenmeester, Poetry and Truth (in English), Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde, Series 5, Volume 3, Issue 4, 2002, pp. 350–352, online .