Founding Figures and Commentators in Arabic Mathematics

Book excerpt: In this unique insight into the history and philosophy of mathematics and science in the mediaeval Arab world, the eminent scholar Roshdi Rashed illuminates the various historical, textual and epistemic threads that underpinned the history of Arabic mathematical and scientific knowledge up to the seventeenth century. The first of five wide-ranging and comprehensive volumes, this book provides a detailed exploration of Arabic mathematics and sciences in the ninth and tenth centuries. Extensive and detailed analyses and annotations support a number of key Arabic texts, which are translated here into English for the first time. In this volume Rashed focuses on the traditions of celebrated polymaths from the ninth and tenth centuries ‘School of Baghdad’ - such as the Banū Mūsā, Thābit ibn Qurra, Ibrāhīm ibn Sinān, Abū Ja ́far al-Khāzin, Abū Sahl Wayjan ibn Rustām al-Qūhī - and eleventh-century Andalusian mathematicians like Abū al-Qāsim ibn al-Samh, and al-Mu’taman ibn Hūd. The Archimedean-Apollonian traditions of these polymaths are thematically explored to illustrate the historical and epistemological development of ‘infinitesimal mathematics’ as it became more clearly articulated in the eleventh-century influential legacy of al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (‘Alhazen’). Contributing to a more informed and balanced understanding of the internal currents of the history of mathematics and the exact sciences in Islam, and of its adaptive interpretation and assimilation in the European context, this fundamental text will appeal to historians of ideas, epistemologists, mathematicians at the most advanced levels of research.