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Full-Text Articles in History
The Merchant And The Mathematician: Commerce And Accounting, Graziano Gentili, Luisa Simonutti, Daniele C. Struppa
The Merchant And The Mathematician: Commerce And Accounting, Graziano Gentili, Luisa Simonutti, Daniele C. Struppa
Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research
In this article we describe the invention of double-entry bookkeeping (or partita doppiaas it was called in Italian), as a fertile intersection between mathematics and early commerce. We focus our attention on this seemingly simple technique that requires only minimal mathematical expertise, but whose discovery is clearly the result of a mathematical way of thinking, in order to make a conceptual point about the role of mathematics as the humus from which disciplines as different as operations research, computer science, and data science have evolved.