- The client
Working group
A group of scholars in mathematics and ancient sciences, led by Professors Pier Daniele Napolitani and Paolo D’Alessandro, under the aegis of the Galileo Museum in Florence, based on the critical edition curated by the late Professor Giusti and Professor D’Alessandro for the Olschki publishing house, decided to create the digital critical edition of the Liber Abbaci, one of the most significant works in the history of mathematics, written by Leonardo Pisano, known as Fibonacci
- Needs
The challenge to be faced
The digitization of a complex work like a critical edition presents several significant challenges.
- The first is to visually reproduce the methods and conventions that scholars are accustomed to and unwilling to abandon.
- Additionally, there are all the opportunities offered by the interactivity of the tool, which allows, for example, to move “with a click” from one part of the text to another or to the so-called “apparatus,” where sources, citations, variants, the “stemma codicum,” and much more can be found.
- In a mathematical work, it is also necessary to find a way to represent formulas in the style of the era, which is very different from current methods, without compromising their comprehensibility for a modern reader. A true puzzle, both logical and computational.
- The project
Publishing technologies: the birth of MauroTeX
To meet these requirements, eLabor developed over time, in collaboration with Professors Napolitani and D’Alessandro:
- a specific language, called MauroTeX, originally developed for the critical edition (digital and printed) of the mathematical work of Renaissance scientist Francesco Maurolico, based on the LaTeX language, widely used in the mathematical world and beyond, capable of describing all these interactions;
- a software that, starting from an edition encoded in MauroTeX language, can produce both the printed edition and a true digital critical edition, essentially a website, with all the features described above.
Professor Napolitani’s team encoded the Liber Abbaci in MauroTeX language and produced a series of other digital objects, such as formulas, tables, diagrams, and more, integrated into the main language, which ultimately shaped the requested digital critical edition, published on the Galileo Museum website