Mathematical Treasure: Tacquet’s Geometry and Arithmetic

Andrea Tacquet (1612–1660) was a Dutch mathematician trained in the Jesuit schools. He became a Jesuit himself and wrote many texts for use in Jesuit mathematics teaching. His most influential work, Elementa geometriae (1654), offered a simplified presentation of Euclid’s Elements and introduced works of Archimedes to produce a more general approach to the study of the subject. The book became very popular and was used for many years for geometry instruction. The title page and the frontispiece for a 1752 English edition of this work are shown above.

For images from another copy of this book, see Mathematical Treasure: Tacquet’s Euclid and Archimedes and Mathematical Treasure: Tacquet’s Geometry.

Tacquet’s arithmetics were also very popular. These images are from a 1704 edition of his 1656 Practical and Theoretical Arithmetic.

In Table I, page 153, a “Pythagorean Table” of multiplication facts is used to demonstrate the process of carrying out the operation of multiplication using a set of Napier’s rods. The illustration on the bottom left of the page above shows the rod arrangement to find the product: \(597\times 9.\) The answer, \(5373,\) is read across the bottom of the configuration.

For a demonstration of multiplication using Napier’s rods, see “John Napier: His Life, His Logs, and His Bones” in Convergence.

The images above are presented courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

Index to Mathematical Treasures