ABSTRACT
The Whetstone of Witte stands at the eve of a critical era for the development of algebra. The idea of a productive overlap between algebra and cipher is not a new one: in a 1997 essay, Peter Pesic argues compellingly for a functional parallel between Viete's systematic methods of algebraic analysis and his work on cryptanalysis, and a considerable body of recent work explores ways in which the emerging discipline of algebra frames itself at various points as a language. This chapter discusses the algebraic work of a figure who stands among seventeenth-century mathematicians both as a precocious symbolist and as an explicit promoter of the use and development of symbolic notation. It argues that the encrypted message may offer a useful model for understanding the complex function of charactered quantity in the early days of symbolic algebra.
