A book on the history of mathematics that helps us understand the origins of one of the key words of our present: algorithms.
Nowadays algorithms are associated to Google, computers, social platforms and artificial intelligence. But their history is much more ancient: since ancient times, the need to solve mathematical problems with appropriate computational rules has always accompanied the life of man, starting from very concrete and daily needs such as distributing agricultural products, dividing an inheritance, measuring a piece of land, and allowing merchants to carry out their activities with profit. The Middle Ages, in particular, was a period of great cultural evolution, thanks to the rediscovery of cultural and scientific sources, Greeks sources and to Arab mathematicians, who in the 9th century spread the Indian numeration system to the Mediterranean, radically changing the way calculations were done. The figures of Muhammad ibn Musa alKhwarizmi (from whom we derive the term «algorithm»), the Spanish monks who translated the works of Arab mathematicians into Latin, the Pisan Fibonacci, merchant and mathematician, the many “abacus masters” who taught calculus to the children of merchants, as well as humanist mathematicians such as Piero della Francesca and Luca Pacioli, stand out in this choral book whose protagonist is a society that was laying the foundations of our contemporary times.

English sample available．

Giorgio Ausiello is professor emeritus of Computer Engineering at La Sapienza University in Rome. He has been a member of the Academia Europaea since 1996, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Paris-Dauphine in 2004. His co-authored works include Complexity and Approximation (Springer, 1999), The Power of Algorithms (Springer, 2013), Linguaggi, modelli, complessità (Franco Angeli, 2014) and The Making of a New Science (Springer, 2018).