Abstract:

Nowadays, mathematicians publish articles in specialized magazine to communicate new results to colleagues, but it has not always been so. The first scientific journals were born in England only in the 16th century, while in Italy it spread only from the 19th century. Until then, scientific communication took place through letters exchanged between scholars.

The anecdote regarding the conflict between Cardano and Tartaglia regarding the resolution of the third-degree equation is well known. Cardano asks Tartaglia to reveal the resolutive formula to him with the promise not to detect it. Tartaglia, instead of writing the formula, sends him a poem, almost a riddle. Tartaglia, however, was not the first to use poems or prose to describe the solutions of an algebraic equation.

Already in the 12th century, Ibn Al-Yasamin, a Berber mathemati-cian, who lived and studied in Seville, wrote an educational poem on algebra. The fame of Ibn al-Yāsamīn is linked to a brief didactic po-em of 54 lines, titled Urjūza fī l-jabr wa l-muqābala (Poem on com-pletion and balancing), which was widespread both in the West and in the East Mussulman. Around 1190-91, he recited, taught and commented it for some time in Seville before moving to Marrakesh. It was the success of this work that encouraged him to write another one of 55 verses on the square roots and a third of only 8 verses in which he exhibited a method of double false position to determine proportional magnitudes.

The didactic poems were part of a new kind of manuals which could also be in prose. These were very concise texts, which condensed knowledge into sentences that were easy to keep in mind, containing useful terminology and rules. Their initial aim was to help students at the end of a course of study to remember terms and rules to use di-rectly for problem solving. A fundamental role was entrusted to memorization, in which understanding was often absent and re-quired more detailed explanations. We still remember that Cardano, in his Ars Magna, wrote a rule in Latin and in the form of a nursery rhyme to remember how the solution of a second-degree equation can be found.

Even Michael Stiffel in his Arithmetica Integra (1544) writes, always in Latin, a mnemonic rule to find the solutions of an equation indi-cated with the acronym AMASIAS, from the initial letter of each verse.

In more recent times, Giorgio Gaber, a famous Italian singer, wrote a song entitled The equation, in which he cites the most common er-rors in solving algebraic equations. Lucio Battisti, another Italian singer, wrote a sing entitled Equazioni in which we can find many words taken from mathematics.

Nowadays many rappers have devoted themselves to writing musical pieces in order to explain and make the study of mathematics and geometry more enjoyable.

In this article, we repurpose the didactic poem by Al-Yasamin, the works of Cardano and Stiffel because we believe that they can de-sign a very valid interdisciplinary path that combines History, Latin and Mathematics. We also think that, in order to bring the new gen-erations closer to Mathematics and make them loved it, teachers can also use non-traditional teaching media such as songs, poems and prose and they can also encourage students to produce themselves poems, songs or short sketches about mathematical topics. The new teaching methods, such as flipped classroom, use of multimedia labs and other expressive forms, allow teachers to propose non-traditional activities.

Keywords:

Mathematics, Algebra, History of Mathematics, Education.