school at Rheims for ten years and became distinguished for his profound scholarship. By King Otto I. and his successors Gerbert was held in highest esteem. He was elected bishop of Rheims, then of Ravenna, and finally was made Pope under the name of Sylvester II. by his former pupil Emperor Otho III. He died in 1003, after a life intricately involved in many political and ecclesiastical quarrels. Such was the career of the greatest mathematician of the tenth century in Europe. By his contemporaries his mathematical knowledge was considered wonderful. Many even accused him of criminal intercourse with evil spirits.
Gerbert enlarged the stock of his knowledge by procuring copies of rare books. Thus in Mantua he found the geometry of Boethius. Though this is of small scientific value, yet it is of great importance in history. It was at that time the only book from which European scholars could learn the elements of geometry. Gerbert studied it with zeal, and is generally believed himself to be the author of a geometry. H. Weissenborn denies his authorship, and claims that the book in question consists of three parts which cannot come from one and the same author.[21] This geometry contains nothing more than the one of Boethius, but the fact that occasional errors in the latter are herein corrected shows that the author had mastered the subject. "The first mathematical paper of the Middle Ages which deserves this name," says Hankel, "is a letter of Gerbert to Adalbold, bishop of Utrecht," in which is explained the reason why the area of a triangle, obtained "geometrically" by taking the product of the base by half its altitude, differs from the area calculated "arithmetically," according to the formula , used by surveyors, where a stands for a side of an equilateral triangle. He gives the correct explanation that in the latter formula all the small squares, in which the triangle is sup-
