Education in medieval Europe

 There were three quotes that made me to stop and think.

One of the quotes was “A knowledge of three subjects of the quadrivium was involved: music, arithmetic, and astronomy”. I could know what kinds of specific subjects were involved as part of quadrivium which was based on the learning of antiquity. For the arithmetic, I could know that it shows its Greek origins very well. 

Moreover, the arithmetic of business was called logistic, and it was considered different from the arithmetic which was a philosophical study. 

Second quote I was interested was “Nicomachus of Gerasa (c. A.D. 200) wrote much on number mysticism, a sort of theology of numbers”. It was interesting to know that Nicomachus considered the odd numbers as male and even numbers as female. Moreover, he made a strange distinction between the “divine number”.  He sorted general concept of number that only existed in creator  - god ’s mind and scientific number that were common numbers known to people on earth. 

Last quote I picked was “The Hindu-Arabic number system was introduced; zero became a familiar concept in a hither-to zeroes world;”. It was introduced in the third period, from the end of the twelfth century to the end of the Middle Ages. It was nice to know the time when zero became well known to people and aware of it.