Islam and science: three great unknown Arab mathematicians and their contribution

A copy of Leonardo of Pisa’s Liber Abbaci, better known as the Fibonacci, would become Europe’s first great medieval mathematician.

“What is fascinating is that on page 406 there is a reference to an ancient text called Modum algebre et almuchabal and in the margin is written the name Maumeht, the Latinized version of the Arabic name Mohammed,” says Al-Khalili.

It was Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Jwārizmī, known in Spanish as Al-Juarismi, who lived approximately between the years 780 and 850.

Al-Khuarismi described the revolutionary idea that you can represent any number you want with just 10 simple symbols.

This great mathematician, who emigrated from eastern Persia to Baghdad, gave the West numbers and the decimal system. He is often considered the father of algebra.

“Many ideas that were once thought to be new and brilliant concepts thanks to European mathematicians of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries are now known to have been developed by Arab / Islamic mathematicians about four centuries earlier,” writes John Joshep. O’Connor and Edmund Frederick Robertson, of the University of St. Andrews, United Kingdom.

“In many ways, the mathematics being studied today has a style that is much closer to the Arab / Islamic contribution than that of the Greeks.”

There have been great mathematicians in the Arab and Islamic world throughout history. Here are three of them.

For Juan Martos Quesada, a retired professor and former director of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid, one of the main contributions of Arab mathematicians “was to save Greek and Latin science through their translations.” .

But they also recovered the best of science developed by the Indians.

“The great importance of Al-Batani is that he managed to unite astronomy and mathematics and turn them into the same field of study,” Martos Quesada told BBC Mundo.

“He applied many mathematical formulas to astronomy. For example, he determined the solar year in 365 days with great precision, which was a great achievement, as we are talking about the late ninth and early tenth centuries.” .

“In relation to the equinoxes he studied them and found that there were errors in the accounts made by Ptolemy, and this served to perfect the whole of Ptolemy’s Greek heritage which the Arab mathematicians received.”

He also introduced a number of trigonometric relations.

Al-Khalili visited the University of Padua, Italy, and saw one of the most important books in the history of science: De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, published in 1543 by Nicolaus Copernicus.

“The importance of this book is enormous. Copernicus argues for the first time since ancient times that all the planets, including the Earth, revolve around the sun.”

“Many historians describe him as the initiator of the European scientific revolution.”

Copernicus cites Muhammad Aracenfis, who is the great Al-Battānī.

“It’s a great revelation for me to explicitly mention a ninth-century Muslim who provided a lot of information about his sightings.”

“Copernicus made extensive use of Al-Batani’s observations on the position of the planets, the sun, the moon, and the stars.”

Jaime Coullaut Cordero, a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Salamanca, spoke to BBC Mundo about Ibn Al-Shatir, an astronomer and mathematician born in Damascus around 1304.

“He was little known in the West because his works were not translated into Latin.”

However, he clarifies that in the 1980s, “researchers discovered the planetary models of Ibn Al-Shatir and realized that they were the same as those proposed by Copernicus centuries later.”

Shaikh Mohammad Razaullah Ansari, Professor Emeritus of Physics at Aligarh Muslim University in India, wrote an article for the UNESCO site on a 10th and 11th century Arab scholar who devoted himself not only to mathematics, but also in physics, mechanics, astronomy, philosophy, and medicine.

This is the great Abū Ali al-Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham al-Baṣrī, known in the West as Alhazen and in Spanish as Alhacén.

Born in 965 in Iraq, he died in 1040 in Egypt.

He was one of the famous scientists in Cairo and was called the “second Ptolemy” by Arab scholars.

He is considered the father of the modern scientific method.

He developed the methodology of “experimentation as another way to test the basic hypothesis or premise,” explains Razaullah Ansari.

Martos Quesada highlights his contributions to the principles of optics.

In fact, according to Razaullah Ansari, his most famous work is on optics: “Kitab fi al-Manaẓir, in Latin Opticae Thesaurus, which was translated anonymously in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.”

There are seven volumes in which he studied the properties of light experimentally and mathematically.

But he was also a great mathematician, as Ricardo Moreno, author and associate professor of the Faculty of Mathematics at the Complutense University, explains on the page of the Virtual Center for the Dissemination of Mathematics.

“He was one of the first Arab mathematicians to successfully tackle equations of degree higher than the second, geometrically solving that of the third which, more than 1,200 years earlier, Archimedes had posed in his work ‘On the Sphere and the Cylinder ‘. “

In the field of number theory, Alhacén made an important contribution with his work on perfect numbers.

He also made contributions to elementary geometry and studied specific cases of Euclid’s theorems.

Ricardo Moreno notes that Al-Juarismi’s death “roughly coincides with the birth in Egypt of Abu Kamil ibn Aslam ibn Mohammed, called the Egyptian calculator.”

“He lived 80 years and left us many mathematical works. Among them, a treatise on algebra, of which the original Arabic has been lost, but of which we have received two translations, one Latin and the other Hebrew.” .

“Quadratic equations are solved geometrically, like its Baghdad predecessor, but it is based more directly on the Elements.”

According to a brief biography of O’Connor and Robertson, very little is known about the life of Abu Kamil.

But it is enough to understand its role in the development of algebra.

“Kamil was one of the immediate successors of Al-Khuarismi,” the authors note.

In fact, Kamil himself highlights the role of Al-Khuarismi as the “inventor of algebra.”

“However, there is another reason for the importance of Abu Kamil, and that is that his work was the basis of the Fibonacci books,” O’Connor and Robertson point out.

“Kamil is not only important in the development of Arabic algebra, but, through Fibonacci, he also plays a key role in the introduction of algebra to Europe.”