University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Rare Book Room Exhibit

There has been great scholarly debate about Diophantus' life, since almost nothing is known about him except indirectly. There is also considerable debate as to which are commentaries thereupon. His book Arithmetica is a collection of 130 solved problems and give rise to the term Diophantine, which is still used by number theorists today to refer to equations (or systems of equations) whose solutions are integers. It is worth remarking that Diophantus wrote before modern algebraic notation had been invented, and made considerable strides in moving from verbal algebra symbolic algebra.

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