Dear lute netters,
as some of you may know Robert Spencer (editor of the facsimile edition of the
ML lute book) was puzzled by the f 1v which contains a list of 46 permutations
of 8 notes and by the list of factorials on 56r.
Yesterday I noticed that Mersenne's
HARMONICORVM LIBER PRIMVS
published in 1636 (I am afraid I even don't know if this is a Latin version of
his famous Harmonie Universelle) contains:
* A complete list of all 24 permutations of 4 notes.
* A list of factorials from 1 to 64.
Note: 64! has 90 digits and this is probably the largest factorial calculated
without computers.
By the way, a complete list of all permutations of 8 notes would require to
write down 8! = 40320 permutations, which is beyond discussion.
Anyway, obviously the scribe computed 8! on f. 56r which probably is not a
coincidence.
Wild speculation:
One of the scribes knew Mersenne's book.
Rainer adS
To get on or off this list see list information at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
