Capitalism and Arithmetic

Book excerpt: "The Treviso Arithmetic, or Arte dell'Abbaco, is an anonymous textbook in commercial arithmetic written in vernacular Venetian and published in Treviso, Italy in 1478. The Treviso Arithmetic is the earliest known printed mathematics book in the West, and one of the first printed European textbooks dealing with a science. The Treviso Arithmetic is a practical book intended for self study and for use in Venetian trade. It is written in vernacular Venetian and communicated knowledge to a large population. It helped to end the monopoly on mathematical knowledge and gave important information to the middle class. It was not written for a large audience, but was intended to teach mathematics of everyday currency. The Treviso became one of the first mathematics books written for the expansion of human knowledge. It provided an opportunity for the common person, rather than only a privileged few, to learn the art of computation. The Treviso Arithmetic provided an early example of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system computational algorithms."--Wikipedia.