ABSTRACT

Jacob Klein (1899–1978) was a Russian-born American philosopher and author of “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra”, an extended two-part article that was later translated into English and published as a book with the title Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra. Despite the profound phenomenological relevance and context of, Klein’s contribution to the phenomenological tradition has only recently come to be acknowledged and in some quarters appreciated. Klein’s research provides an account of Viete’s transformative appropriation in the 16th century of the ancient Greek geometrical method of logistical analysis and synthesis to purify the algebra of the “barbarians” and invent symbolic algebra and therewith modern symbolic mathematics. Klein exhibits the phenomenological possibility of the methodological naivete of the symbols of symbolic mathematics by reconstructing their origin in Viete’s invention of pure algebra.