Commutativity and collinearity: a historical case study of the interconnection of mathematical ideas. Part II

Abstract

This paper investigates the discovery of an intriguing and fundamental connection between the famous but apparently unrelated mathematical work of two late third-century mathematicians. This link went unnoticed for well over 1500 years until the publication of two groundbreaking but again ostensibly unrelated works by two German mathematicians at the close of the nineteenth century. In this, the second and final part of the paper, we continue our examination of the chain of mathematical events and the related development of mathematical disciplines, without which the connection might never have been noticed in the first place.