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comment by Devac
Devac  ·  87 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What Are You Reading? Book Thread Rapture

I'm reading both Boethian Number Theory (De Institutione Arithmetica) and Fundamentals of Music (De Institutione Musica), and it's a good insight into how people conceptualized numbers and their relations/representations. It has a lot of that "continuous function is the one I can draw without lifting the pen off the paper" meets Feynman's lectures flair to it, describing in word or simple drawing what today would have been a formula/proof. They're even less rigorous than expected, but (often enough) very intuitive and demonstrative at the same time. Not always, heaven forbid; when it's muddled, I can spend more time working through a paragraph than an entire pulp novel, but it's easy to see why they were amongst the primary textbooks pretty much until the early modern period. They also tangetially inspired me to read some of the 'lesser' works by Aristotle in the near future, like On Generation and Creation or Meteorologica.

Combined with my earlier readings of Ptolemy's Almagest and Euclid's Elements, I guess I'm about to finally graduate the Quadrivium ;).

Oh, and yesterday I finished The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion by Daniel McCoy. Good read, covers the basics and goes the extra mile to point out the differences between what we know, what we can't know, and what is just romanticized later/modern vision of vikings and their mythology. The translations/retellings in the second part of the book are a bit too stilted, and it honestly wouldn't take that much effort to improve them, but they certainly aren't bad either.