Levi Ben Gerson (1288–1344), also known as Gersonides or Leo de Balneolis, his Provençal name, was one of the most original Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages, and he wrote on logic, philosophy, biblical exegesis, mathematics, and astronomy. He lived in Orange, where the de Balneolis family was prominent, and occasionally in Avignon (France). During the last years of his life he maintained relations with the papal court of Clement VI (1342–1352), to whom he dedicated a Latin version of his work on trigonometry and on the Jacob Staff (Tractatus instrumenti astronomie, 1342).
On mathematics, his Ma ˓ aseh Hoshev (Work of the Computer, 1321) deals with arithmetic, summations of series, algebra, and combinatorial analysis. At the request of the French musical scholar Philippe de Vitry, he composed his De numeris harmonicis(On Harmonic Numbers, 1343, extant only in Latin) to demonstrate that numbers belonging to geometrical progressions of ratio 2 or 3 and first term 1, or generated by...
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References
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Mancha, J.L. (2008). Levi Ben Gerson. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_8699
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