ABSTRACT
Jacob Klein wrote about Renaissance symbolic algebra dealing with four mathematicians. Simon Stevin is the second of them, after François Viète and before René Descartes and John Wallis. In a ten-page chapter, Klein explained Stevin’s theory about history, emphasizing the decimal positional system and the concepts of first and second intentions to show the importance of material cause in Stevin’s concept of number. In this chapter, I build on Klein’s results and show how history, mathematics and also dialectic and ethics must be thought together, in a broader perspective, in Stevin’s work. This art of thinking, with a mathesis as a kernal, explains why Renaissance thinkers have to define a new concept of number.
