His research is wide-ranging, and also includes studies of Greek, Latin, Chinese, medieval Islamic and European, and modern mathematics.
For example, he argues that early Babylonian arithmetic emerged from the process of state formation.
More recently, he has studied the early Italian abacus tradition, arguing that its origins lie prior to Fibonacci's Liber Abacci and "that it is much less directly influenced by the scholarly level of Arabic mathematics than generally thought.
[4] He pioneered the use of "conformal translation" in this context, thereby preserving the distinctions between different conceptions of what had been regarded as equivalent mathematical operations.
[1][4] Using this foundation, it became possible to understand texts that had previously been regarded as consisting of algebraic manipulations of abstract quantities as series of concrete operations on geometric figures.