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One central narrative in the history of science addresses how we came to use letters, lines, and squiggles to compress dramatic mathematical and physical stories into compact, digestible phrases of algebra. For historians of mathematics, the issue is doubly pressing. First, algebraic language is simply how modern mathematics works, so its emergence is worth knowing about. The second reason follows. For easier comprehension, historians tend to translate old texts into modern algebraic notation and then deal with ancient mathematics through this algebraic translation.

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