Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy

by Arielle Saiber

Measured Words explores the rich commerce between computation and writing that proliferated in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. In this captivating and generously illustrated work, Arielle Saiber studies the relationship between number, shape, and the written word in the works of four exceptional thinkers of the Leon Battista Alberti, Luca Pacioli, Niccolò Tartaglia, and Giambattista Della Porta. Although these Renaissance humanists came from different social classes and practised the mathematical and literary arts at varying levels of sophistication, they were all guided by a sense that there exist deep ontological and epistemological bonds between computational and verbal thinking and production. Their shared view that a network or continuity exists between the literary arts and mathematics yielded extraordinary results, from Alberti’s treatise on cryptography and Pacioli’s design calculations for the Roman alphabet to Tartaglia’s poetic solutions of cubic equations and Della Porta’s dramatic applications of geometry. Through lively, cogent analysis of these and other related texts of the period, Measured Words presents, literally and figuratively, brilliant examples of what interdisciplinary work can offer us.

276 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 1, 2021

Reviews

[Lena · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the few works at the intersection of literature and mathematics. Most of these are by mathematicians who are interested, but not very educated in literature and literary criticism, so the results are a bit cringe. I was glad to find this book, which is written by a literary scholar, and hoped for a good literary analysis of texts made by mathematicians. But I am a bit disappointed. I only read two of the four chapters and they were quite interesting, but methodically questionable and not that profound.