Nicomachus of Gerasa

Nicomachus of Gerasa was a Neopythagorean mathematician of the first or second century, from a city in what is now Jordan, whose Introduction to Arithmetic was the standard text on the theory of numbers for a thousand years, translated into Latin by Apuleius and adapted by Boethius, and taught in the quadrivium of every medieval university. It treats the kinds of numbers, odd, even, prime, perfect, figured, and their proportions, without proofs, as a preparation for the study of harmony and the cosmos. The Great Books set prints it beside Euclid, to show what arithmetic looked like before algebra.