Abstract
Much more than a poet, Geoffrey Chaucer was an amateur astronomer, philosopher, and acquaintance of two influential Oxford logicians, and his literary work has great fun with the fourteenth-century coalescence of arithmetic, geometry, and logic into the single discipline more recognizable today as Mathematics. This essay covers the evolution of early probability theory; the development of more sophisticated approaches to arithmetic and geometry, especially in terms of divisibility; and the growing ingenuity of medieval ‘physics’, and takes a romp through the diapason of Chaucerian modes and interests, from stargazing to farting, from tavern dicing to the tragedy of inconstant love. Through it all emerges Chaucer’s fascination with the human possibilities and limitations of medieval mathematics, and the literary-critical value of his work’s logico-mathematical context.
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Baker, D. (2021). Numbered Possibilities: Chaucer and the Evolution of Late-Medieval Mathematics. In: Tubbs, R., Jenkins, A., Engelhardt, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55478-1_2
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