Levi Ben Gerson (1288–1344), also known as Gersonides or Leo de Balneolis, his Provençal name, was one of the most original Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages, and he wrote on logic, philosophy, biblical exegesis, mathematics, and astronomy. He lived in Orange, where the de Balneolis family was prominent, and occasionally in Avignon (France). During the last years of his life he maintained relations with the papal court of Clement VI (1342–1352), to whom he dedicated a Latin version of his work on trigonometry and on the Jacob Staff (Tractatus instrumenti astronomie, 1342).
On mathematics, his Ma ˓ aseh Hoshev (Work of the Computer, 1321) deals with arithmetic, summations of series, algebra, and combinatorial analysis. At the request of the French musical scholar Philippe de Vitry, he composed his De numeris harmonicis(On Harmonic Numbers, 1343, extant only in Latin) to demonstrate that numbers belonging to geometrical progressions of ratio 2 or 3 and first term 1, or generated by...
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Freudenthal, G. ed. Studies on Gersonides. A Fourteenth‐Century Jewish Philosopher‐Scientist. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992.
Goldstein, B. R. The Astronomical Tables of Levi ben Gerson. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1974.
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‐‐‐. A New Set of Fourteenth Century Planetary Observations. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 132 (1988): 371–99.
‐‐‐. Levi Ben Gerson and the Brightness of Mars. Journal for the History of Astronomy, 1996.
‐‐‐. The Physical Astronomy of Levi Ben Gerson. Perspectives on Science: Historical, Philosophical, Social, 1997.
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Mancha, José Luis and ben Gerson Levi. The Provençal Version of Levi Ben Gerson's Tables for Eclipses. Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences 48.141 (1998): 269–352.
Meyer, Christian, Jean François Wicker, and ben Gerson Levi. Musique Et mathématique Au XIVe siécle: Le De Numeris Harmonicis De Leo Hebraeus. Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences 50.144 (2000): 30–67.
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Thro, E. Broydrick. Leonardo's Early Work on the Pinhole Camera: The Astronomical Heritage of Levi Ben Gerson. Achademia Leonardi Vinci, 1996.
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Mancha, J.L. (2008). Levi Ben Gerson. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_8699
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