Wow. You are projecting us back to the mid-12th century, before we got hold of Algoritmi's famous book: Kitab Al-Jabr, i.e., Liber Algebrae. Before that it was

Wow. You are projecting us back to the mid-12th century, before we got hold of Algoritmi's famous book: Kitab Al-Jabr, i.e., Liber Algebrae. Before that it was only arithmetic and bits and bobs of Euclid's Elements (=Geometry). That was all they had.