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Islamic Science
Science in the medieval Islamic world was the science developed and practised during the Islamic Golden Age under the Umayyads of Córdoba, the Abbadids of Seville, the Samanids, the Ziyarids, the Buyids in Persia, the Abbasid Caliphate and beyond, spanning the period roughly between 786 and 1258. Islamic scientific achievements encompassed a wide range of subject areas, especially astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Other subjects of scientific inquiry included alchemy and chemistry, botany and agronomy, geography and cartography, ophthalmology, pharmacology, physics, and zoology. Medieval Islamic science had practical purposes as well as the goal of understanding. For example, astronomy was useful for determining the ''Qibla'', the direction in which to pray, botany had practical application in agriculture, as in the works of Ibn Bassal and Ibn al-'Awwam, and geography enabled Abu Zayd al-Balkhi to make accurate maps. Islamic mathematicians such as Al-Khwarizmi, Avi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tusi Couple
The Tusi couple is a mathematical device in which a small circle rotates inside a larger circle twice the diameter of the smaller circle. Rotations of the circles cause a point on the circumference of the smaller circle to oscillate back and forth in linear motion along a diameter of the larger circle. The Tusi couple is a 2-cusped hypocycloid. The couple was first proposed by the 13th-century Persian astronomer and mathematician Nasir al-Din al-Tusi in his 1247 ''Tahrir al-Majisti (Commentary on the Almagest)'' as a solution for the latitudinal motion of the inferior planets, and later used extensively as a substitute for the equant introduced over a thousand years earlier in Ptolemy's ''Almagest''. Original description The translation of the copy of Tusi's original description of his geometrical model alludes to at least one inversion of the model to be seen in the diagrams: :If two coplanar circles, the diameter of one of which is equal to half the diameter of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Physics In The Medieval Islamic World
The natural sciences saw various advancements during the Golden Age of Islam (from roughly the mid 8th to the mid 13th centuries), adding a number of innovations to the Transmission of the Classics (such as Aristotle, Ptolemy, Euclid, Neoplatonism).''Classical Arabic Philosophy An Anthology of Sources'', Translated by Jon McGinnis and David C. Reisman. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2007. pg. xix During this period, Islamic theology was encouraging of thinkers to find knowledge. Thinkers from this period included Al-Farabi, Abu Bishr Matta, Ibn Sina, al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham and Ibn Bajjah. These works and the important commentaries on them were the wellspring of science during the medieval period. They were translated into Arabic, the ''lingua franca'' of this period. Islamic scholarship in the sciences had inherited Aristotelian physics from the Greeks and during the Islamic Golden Age developed it further. However the Islamic world had a greater respect for knowle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Smallpox
Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by variola virus (often called smallpox virus) which belongs to the genus Orthopoxvirus. The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977, and the World Health Organization (WHO) certified the global eradication of the disease in 1980, making it the only human disease to be eradicated. The initial symptoms of the disease included fever and vomiting. This was followed by formation of ulcers in the mouth and a skin rash. Over a number of days, the skin rash turned into the characteristic fluid-filled blisters with a dent in the center. The bumps then scabbed over and fell off, leaving scars. The disease was spread between people or via contaminated objects. Prevention was achieved mainly through the smallpox vaccine. Once the disease had developed, certain antiviral medication may have helped. The risk of death was about 30%, with higher rates among babies. Often, those who survived had extensive scarring of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arabic Numerals
Arabic numerals are the ten numerical digits: , , , , , , , , and . They are the most commonly used symbols to write decimal numbers. They are also used for writing numbers in other systems such as octal, and for writing identifiers such as computer symbols, trademarks, or license plates. The term often implies a decimal number, in particular when contrasted with Roman numerals. They are also called Western Arabic numerals, Ghubār numerals, Hindu-Arabic numerals, Western digits, Latin digits, or European digits. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' differentiates them with the fully capitalized ''Arabic Numerals'' to refer to the Eastern digits. The term numbers or numerals or digits often implies only these symbols, however this can only be inferred from context. It was in the Algerian city of Béjaïa that the Italian scholar Fibonacci first encountered the numerals; his work was crucial in making them known throughout Europe. European trade, books, and colonialism help ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geometry
Geometry (; ) is, with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. It is concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is called a '' geometer''. Until the 19th century, geometry was almost exclusively devoted to Euclidean geometry, which includes the notions of point, line, plane, distance, angle, surface, and curve, as fundamental concepts. During the 19th century several discoveries enlarged dramatically the scope of geometry. One of the oldest such discoveries is Carl Friedrich Gauss' ("remarkable theorem") that asserts roughly that the Gaussian curvature of a surface is independent from any specific embedding in a Euclidean space. This implies that surfaces can be studied ''intrinsically'', that is, as stand-alone spaces, and has been expanded into the theory of manifolds and Riemannian geometry. Later in the 19th century, it appeared that geom ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Trigonometry
Trigonometry () is a branch of mathematics that studies relationships between side lengths and angles of triangles. The field emerged in the Hellenistic world during the 3rd century BC from applications of geometry to astronomical studies. The Greeks focused on the calculation of chords, while mathematicians in India created the earliest-known tables of values for trigonometric ratios (also called trigonometric functions) such as sine. Throughout history, trigonometry has been applied in areas such as geodesy, surveying, celestial mechanics, and navigation. Trigonometry is known for its many identities. These trigonometric identities are commonly used for rewriting trigonometrical expressions with the aim to simplify an expression, to find a more useful form of an expression, or to solve an equation. History Sumerian astronomers studied angle measure, using a division of circles into 360 degrees. They, and later the Babylonians, studied the ratios of the sid ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Algebra
Algebra () is one of the areas of mathematics, broad areas of mathematics. Roughly speaking, algebra is the study of mathematical symbols and the rules for manipulating these symbols in formulas; it is a unifying thread of almost all of mathematics. Elementary algebra deals with the manipulation of variable (mathematics), variables (commonly represented by Roman letters) as if they were numbers and is therefore essential in all applications of mathematics. Abstract algebra is the name given, mostly in mathematical education, education, to the study of algebraic structures such as group (mathematics), groups, ring (mathematics), rings, and field (mathematics), fields (the term is no more in common use outside educational context). Linear algebra, which deals with linear equations and linear mappings, is used for modern presentations of geometry, and has many practical applications (in weather forecasting, for example). There are many areas of mathematics that belong to algebra, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jamshīd Al-Kāshī
Ghiyāth al-Dīn Jamshīd Masʿūd al-Kāshī (or al-Kāshānī) ( fa, غیاث الدین جمشید کاشانی ''Ghiyās-ud-dīn Jamshīd Kāshānī'') (c. 1380 Kashan, Iran – 22 June 1429 Samarkand, Transoxania) was a Persian astronomer and mathematician during the reign of Tamerlane. Much of al-Kāshī's work was not brought to Europe, and still, even the extant work, remains unpublished in any form. Biography Al-Kashi was born in 1380, in Kashan, in central Iran. This region was controlled by Tamerlane, better known as Timur. The situation changed for the better when Timur died in 1405, and his son, Shah Rokh, ascended into power. Shah Rokh and his wife, Goharshad, a Turkish princess, were very interested in the sciences, and they encouraged their court to study the various fields in great depth. Consequently, the period of their power became one of many scholarly accomplishments. This was the perfect environment for al-Kashi to begin his career as one of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Avicenna
Ibn Sina ( fa, ابن سینا; 980 – June 1037 CE), commonly known in the West as Avicenna (), was a Persian polymath who is regarded as one of the most significant physicians, astronomers, philosophers, and writers of the Islamic Golden Age, and the father of early modern medicine. Sajjad H. Rizvi has called Avicenna "arguably the most influential philosopher of the pre-modern era". He was a Muslim Peripatetic philosopher influenced by Greek Aristotelian philosophy. Of the 450 works he is believed to have written, around 240 have survived, including 150 on philosophy and 40 on medicine. His most famous works are '' The Book of Healing'', a philosophical and scientific encyclopedia, and '' The Canon of Medicine'', a medical encyclopedia which became a standard medical text at many medieval universities and remained in use as late as 1650. Besides philosophy and medicine, Avicenna's corpus includes writings on astronomy, alchemy, geography and geology, psyc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Al-Khwarizmi
Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī ( ar, محمد بن موسى الخوارزمي, Muḥammad ibn Musā al-Khwārazmi; ), or al-Khwarizmi, was a Persian polymath from Khwarazm, who produced vastly influential works in mathematics, astronomy, and geography. Around 820 CE, he was appointed as the astronomer and head of the library of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.Maher, P. (1998), "From Al-Jabr to Algebra", ''Mathematics in School'', 27(4), 14–15. Al-Khwarizmi's popularizing treatise on algebra ('' The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing'', c. 813–833 CEOaks, J. (2009), "Polynomials and Equations in Arabic Algebra", ''Archive for History of Exact Sciences'', 63(2), 169–203.) presented the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations. One of his principal achievements in algebra was his demonstration of how to solve quadratic equations by completing the square, for which he provided geometric justifications. Because he was the f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abu Zayd Al-Balkhi
Abu Zayd Ahmed ibn Sahl Balkhi ( fa, ابو زید احمد بن سهل بلخی) was a Persian Muslim polymath: a geographer, mathematician, physician, psychologist and scientist. Born in 850 CE in Shamistiyan, in the province of Balkh, Greater Khorasan, he was a disciple of al-Kindi. He also founded the "Balkhī school" of terrestrial mapping in Baghdad. Al-Balkhi is believed to have been the first to diagnose that mental illness can have psychological and physiological causes and he was the first to typify four types of emotional disorders: 1) fear and anxiety, 2) anger and aggression, 3) sadness and depression, and 4) obsessions. Biography According to Abu Muhammad al-Hassan ibn al-Waziri, who was a student of the polymath, Abu Zayd al-Balkhi was a man whose face was covered in scars that he acquired following a bout with smallpox. In addition to this, he had a reserved and isolated character, leading scholars to have a lack of knowledge on his personal life. Approximately ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ibn Al-'Awwam
Ibn al-'Awwam ( ar, ابن العوام), also called Abu Zakariya Ibn al-Awwam ( ar, أبو زكريا بن العوام), was a Muslim Arab agriculturist who flourished at Seville (modern-day southern Spain) in the later 12th century. He wrote a lengthy handbook on agriculture entitled in Arabic ''Kitāb al-Filāḥa'' (English: ''Book on Agriculture''), which is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject in medieval Arabic, and one of the most important medieval works on the subject in any language. It was published in Spanish and French translations in the 19th century. The edition in French is about 1350 pages. Biography His full name was Abu Zakariya Yahya ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Al-'Awwam Al-Ishbili ( ar, أبو زكريا يحيى بن محمد بن أحمد بن العوام الإشبيلي). The appellation "Al-Ishbili" at the end of his name translates as "the Sevillean" i.e. from Seville. His dates of birth and death are known. Nearly everything that is kno ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
