3. THE ORIGINS

An interesting thread for historians to follow is how and where Llull got his own pioneering notions. For some of them we have a hint. Thus, the idea of starting from a finite set of rules to develop a whole system has a remote ancestor in Euclides and the Alexandrian greeks and a more recent and innovative version in Al-Khwarizmi's "algebra" work -that Llull quotes as a source. This book, translated into Latin shortly before Llull's time, created a sensation with its novel idea of rule-directed manipulations and prescribed "algorithms" (a concept and a word derived from the muslim mathematician). On the other hand, Llull's idea of a comprehensive method to encompass such rules and develop concepts was probably a formal extension of a now-forgotten integral part of medieval education: the complex set of elaborated techniques for reminding and structucturing things in human memory in a printless age (actually, Llull's method was developed in this sense by Petrus Ramus in the l6th century and was then an inspiration for Bacon and Descartes). As for the mechanical devices (the rotating disks), we now know that similar "question-answering disks" were on sale in the 1260's or 1270's in Algeria (as tools for divination), and that Llull could well know them before his 1274 formulation. (Llull's disks met an unexpected use in cryptography, when Leopardi first used them for coding, and we can still recognize them in the rotors of the WW II German Enigma machine, a distant echo of Llull's disks.)