Diophantus
Diophantus [ edit ] Title page of the 1621 edition of Diophantus 's Arithmetica , translated into Latin by Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac . Very little is known about Diophantus of Alexandria; he probably lived in the third century AD, that is, about five hundred years after Euclid. Six out of the thirteen books of Diophantus's Arithmetica survive in the original Greek and four more survive in an Arabic translation. The Arithmetica is a collection of worked-out problems where the task is invariably to find rational solutions to a system of polynomial equations, usually of the form � ( � , � ) = � 2 or � ( � , � , � ) = � 2 . Thus, nowadays, we speak of Diophantine equations when we speak of polynomial equations to which rational or integer solutions must be found. One may say that Diophantus was studying rational points , that is, points whose coordinates are rational—on curves ...