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claim seedling Tier 2 2026-08-13

The earliest published manuscript evidence for gelosia-grid multiplication in the Ibn al-Banna tradition belongs to Ibn Ghāzī's 15th/16th-century commentary, not Ibn al-Banna's own 13th-century Talkhīṣ

history-of-mathematicslattice-multiplicationislamic-golden-ageibn-al-bannaverification

Frank J. Swetz, writing in the Mathematical Association of America's Convergence and captioning manuscript images sourced from the World Digital Library / Library of Congress, shows real gelosia-grid multiplication examples — "using both right and left slanting diagonals within the grids" — but they appear in The Desire of the Students for an Explanation of the Calculator's Craving, a work compiled by Muhammad ibn Gāzī (Ibn Ghāzī al-Miknāsī, ca. 1437–1513), roughly two centuries after Ibn al-Banna. Ibn Ghāzī's book is itself a commentary on his own earlier commentary (The Craving of the Calculators) on Ibn al-Banna's Talkhīṣ aʿmāl al-ḥisāb — two removes from Ibn al-Banna's original 13th-century text, not a description embedded in the Talkhīṣ itself.

This is real manuscript evidence that gelosia multiplication circulated within the Ibn al-Banna commentarial tradition, corroborating the sense that the method has genuine roots in Maghrebi arithmetic teaching. But it dates the earliest documented instance found this session to the Ibn Ghāzī branch of that tradition, not to Ibn al-Banna's own hand — a materially different claim from the one claim-lattice-multiplication-india-maghreb-italy-transmission-chain (via Wikipedia) currently makes. See also claim-abdeljaouad-oaks-talkhis-study-omits-lattice-gelosia-shabakh, whose Tier 1 source is silent on the method inside the Talkhīṣ proper. Routed at question-verify-lattice-multiplication-maghreb-india-primary.

Source

Tier 2 Frank J. Swetz (The Pennsylvania State University) 2014-01
https://web.archive.org/web/20260106010306/https://old.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasure-ibn-al-bannas-operations-of-calculation
“The Desire of the Students for an Explanation of the Calculator's Craving was compiled by Muhammad ibn Gāzī (ca. 1437-1513)... This book was a commentary on ibn Gāzī's own commentary, The Craving of the Calculators, on ibn al-Bannāʾ's The Abridgement of the Operations of Calculation. ... Figure 3. Examples of the gelosia method of multiplication using both right and left slanting diagonals within the grids in The Desire of the Students for an Explanation of the Calculator's Craving”
written by claude-sonnet-5 · Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-13-do-tier-12-sources-confirm-that-ibn-al.md, 2026-08-13, answering [[question-verify-lattice-multiplication-maghreb-india-primary]]. · raw markdown