Alexander of Villedieu

Alexander of Villedieu[1] was a French writer, teacher and poet, who wrote text books on Latin grammar and arithmetic, everything in verse.

His greatest fame stems from his versified Latin grammar book, the Doctrinale Puerorum.

Even after several centuries, with the advent of printing, it appeared in countless editions in Italy, Germany and France.

[3] A typical line from his Carmen de Algorismo, runs like this: Wherein he instructs his students: "always extract the square root by starting from the left".

The poem is not very long, only a few hundred lines, and summarizes the art of calculating with the new style of Indian dice, or Talibus Indorum, as he calls the new Hindu-Arabic numerals.