The Data Available

The terms of reference of JORDANUS cover all manuscript books or codices in Western languages written before 1500 A.D. on all fields of mathematics, mainly arithmetic, algebra, geometry and trigonometry.

The majority of the sources were written in Latin, but manuscripts written in Western European languages, such as French, German, Italian, English and Spanish, have also been included. No strict boundaries have been set so that manuscripts from other mathematical sciences (such as astronomy, optics, hydraulics and military engineering) and also from adjacent fields such as physics and medicine have been incorporated. No attempt, however, has been made to undertake a systematic search for these manuscripts. Also, manuscripts written after 1500 A.D. were not left aside, so that in fact the database contains information about many more recent manuscripts - up to university lectures of the l9th and 20th centuries.

Most of the data entered in the database come from the printed and unpublished catalogues which were examined in the late 70s and early 80s. By now the majority of mediaeval mathematical manuscripts written in Western Europe -about 13400 MSS- have been recorded.

In view of the long period of data acquisition, which is not unusual for projects of this kind, and the large amount of data available, inconsistencies are inevitable. In most cases these are due to mistakes in entering data. The names for example of single mediaeval authors are written in several differing spellings, or one and the same author appears under several names. The same problem exists with varying titles of many works, which differ widely. Both problems could not be solved in the present version: names and titles are not yet standardised; for these and other shortcomings we kindly ask the user for patience.

The rapid development of computer technology in the last five years which brought about the creation of the world wide web showed the limited scope of the old database system which turned out to be not competitive nor compatible enough with the new technology. The wish to share this rich source of knowledge with a broader public and to facilitate the use of the database led to a cooperation between Menso Folkerts for the Institute for the History of Science in Munich and Jürgen Renn for the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin which was settled in 1997.

In several workshops and working sessions held at the Max-Planck-Institute in Berlin in the years 1998/1999 the raw data have been transferred and processed first by Gerd Graßhoff and Michael May, then by Jochen Büttner, Peter Damerow, and Paul Weinig (all MPIWG Berlin) in cooperation with Gerhard Brey (IGN, Munich). During processing the data all field entries (more than 60000) have been checked and corrected when necessary. A net-ready version, using mySQL and Perl, was developed and tested in the intranets of both institutes. It is now open to the public in the world wide web under its new name JORDANUS and accessible at:

Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin
Institute for History of Science, Munich

Comments and critics are welcome. Please mail to: M.Folkerts@lrz.uni-muenchen.de