§5.3 Quick Answers

Oresme didn't (precisely) invent the integral, which is why Suzuki said "in a sense".  He did work with some concepts that are related.  Calculus history (as Gary and I demonstrate each fall) can be traced back to Babylonian approximation of square root of two, with stops all along the way.  It's hopeless to try to find the first.  Oresme is on the list of stops.  

A rectilineal figure is a general polygon, i.e. a figure with straight lines.  

I ignored Levi ben Gerson's work with sine.  I agree that the triginometry tables are still not impressive compared to al-Kashi.  He uses an interpolation to approximate 1/4°.  al-Kashi solved cube roots to approximate 1°.  The difference is al-Kashi can approximate his as close as he wants (by iteration, as we've seen going back to China) wheras interpolations only give one approximation.  

Debasing currency is something that can only be done by the government.  No one else has the authority to set the value of currency.  

A number raised to the zero power is not itself, nor is it what Chuquet was doing.  

Bradwardine was the first to study the collection of star polygons, not the first to study any of them (merely finding patterns within the class).  He's not using logarithms (don't exist yet), but is expressing something we would express that way.  

Bonfils (about whom we will say no more) needed to use different tables for astronomy in vastly different places on the earth.  This required corrections.  He is not the first to consider decimals, nor is he the most influential.  

"Chuquet's billion is (10^6)^2" (as used in English, but not American).  The notations you know for operations had not yet been developed.  

Usury is charging unreasonably high interest.  

Suzuki is hinting at the earliest European printing at the end of this section/chapter.  

The quadratic formula, basiically, from this point of view, has been known since the dawn of time.