It has the very commendable aim of contributing towards stressing the cultural side of mathematics. ...there appears the widespread interchange of the definitions of excessive and defective numbers. ...it is stated that Euclid contended that every perfect number is of the form 2(2 -1). It is true that Euclid proved that such numbers are perfect whenever 2 - 1 is a prime number but there seems to be no evidence to support the statement that he contended that no other such numbers exist. ...it is stated that the arithmetization of mathematics began with Weierstrass in the sixties of the last century. The fact that this movement is much older was recently emphasized by H. Wieleitner... it is stated that the of Diophantus and the of Fibonacci meant whole numbers, and... we find the statement that in the pre-Vieta period they were committed to natural numbers as the exclusive field for all arithmetic operations. On the contrary, operations with common fractions appear on some of the most ancient mathematical records.
Tobias Dantzig