TITLE: A HISTORICAL-EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND MATHEMATICAL STUDY OF AL-KHWARIZMI'S ARITHMETIC TREATISE
Keywords: History of Mathematics; Islamic Arithmetic; Al-Khwarizm's Arithmetic Treatise; Dixit al-Khwarizm.
This paper is a historical-epistemological and mathematical study of the work of al-Khawarizmi, written in the early ninth century in Baghdad. The work discusses the positional decimal system used by the Indians and its content begins by presenting the numbers and their writing rule to form numbers and continues by presenting the algorithms of arithmetic operations; in short, it is a manual for those who want to learn Indian arithmetic. Throughout our study we refer to the work as al-Khwarizm's Arithmetic Treatise. The original Arabic text is unknown, and the work has been preserved only in a Latin manuscript dating from the fourteenth century preserved and catalogued in the Cambridge University Library under number I.i.6.5. The Cambridge manuscript was translated into Russian by A. P. Yushkiévitch and from Yushkiévitch's Russian translation we made a translation into Portuguese to be used in our study. Adopting a historiographical perspective that contextualizes the knowledge of the past in its time and space of elaboration, we propose to analyze the Arithmetic Treatise of al-Khwarizm with a focus on the algorithms used by the author of the work. To this end, we conducted a detailed bibliographic-documentary study consisting of the reading, translation, and understanding of the procedures of the main document, the Arithmetic Treatise of al-Khwarizm, and from this we listed the contextual elements of the work that needed to be deepened. The epistemological and mathematical historical study of the Treatise is in progress and in a preliminary way it is concluded that although the decimal and positional numeration system presented by al-Khwarizm has characteristics in common with the modern numeration system, the algorithms of calculation differ due to the material conditions and the knowledge available at that time in the near east.