Alī ibn Aḥmad al-Nasawī (; c. 1011 possibly in

Khurasan KhorasanDabeersiaghi, Commentary on Safarnâma-e Nâsir Khusraw, 6th Ed. Tehran, Zavvâr: 1375 (Solar Hijri Calendar) 235–236 (; , ) is a historical eastern region in the Iranian Plateau in West Asia, West and Central Asia that encompasses wes ...

– c. 1075 in

Baghdad Baghdad ( or ; , ) is the capital and List of largest cities of Iraq, largest city of Iraq, located along the Tigris in the central part of the country. With a population exceeding 7 million, it ranks among the List of largest cities in the A ...

) was a

Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

from

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq to the west, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan to the nort ...

. He flourished under the

Buwayhid The Buyid dynasty or Buyid Empire was a Zaydi and later Twelver Shi'a dynasty of Daylamite origin. Founded by Imad al-Dawla, they mainly ruled over central and southern Iran and Iraq from 934 to 1062. Coupled with the rise of other Iranian dyna ...

sultan Majd al-dowleh, who died in 1029-30AD, and under his successor. He wrote a book on

arithmetic Arithmetic is an elementary branch of mathematics that deals with numerical operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In a wider sense, it also includes exponentiation, extraction of roots, and taking logarithms. ...

, and then

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

, entitled the "Satisfying (or Convincing) on Hindu Calculation" (''al-muqni fi-l-hisab al Hindi''). He also wrote on

Archimedes Archimedes of Syracuse ( ; ) was an Ancient Greece, Ancient Greek Greek mathematics, mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and Invention, inventor from the ancient city of Syracuse, Sicily, Syracuse in History of Greek and Hellenis ...

's '' Book of Lemmas'' and Menelaus's theorem (''Kitab al-ishba'', or "satiation"), where he made corrections to the ''Book of Lemmas'' as translated into Arabic by

Thabit ibn Qurra Thabit () is an Arabic name Arabic names have historically been based on a long naming system. Many people from Arabic-speaking and also non-Arab Muslim countries have not had given name, given, middle name, middle, and family names but rather a ...

and last revised by

Nasir al-Din al-Tusi Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī (1201 – 1274), also known as Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (; ) or simply as (al-)Tusi, was a Persians, Persian polymath, architect, Early Islamic philosophy, philosopher, Islamic medicine, phy ...

. Al-Nasawī's arithmetic explains the division of

fractions A fraction (from , "broken") represents a part of a whole or, more generally, any number of equal parts. When spoken in everyday English, a fraction describes how many parts of a certain size there are, for example, one-half, eight-fifths, thre ...

and the extraction of square and cubic roots (square root of 57,342; cubic root of 3, 652, 296) almost in the modern manner. Al-Nasawī replaces

sexagesimal Sexagesimal, also known as base 60, is a numeral system with 60 (number), sixty as its radix, base. It originated with the ancient Sumerians in the 3rd millennium BC, was passed down to the ancient Babylonians, and is still used—in a modified fo ...

decimal fractions The decimal numeral system (also called the base-ten positional numeral system and denary or decanary) is the standard system for denoting integer and non-integer numbers. It is the extension to non-integer numbers (''decimal fractions'') of the ...

. Al-Nasawī criticises earlier authors, but in many cases incorrectly. His work was not original, and he sometimes writes of matters that he does not understand, e.g. "borrowing" in subtraction. Ragep and Kennedy also give an analysis of a mid-12th-century manuscript in which a summary of

Euclid Euclid (; ; BC) was an ancient Greek mathematician active as a geometer and logician. Considered the "father of geometry", he is chiefly known for the '' Elements'' treatise, which established the foundations of geometry that largely domina ...

's ''Elements'' exists by al-Nasawī.

References

External links

*
PDF version
1010s births 1075 deaths 11th-century Iranian mathematicians Scholars from the Seljuk Empire Scholars under the Buyid dynasty {{iran-scientist-stub

References

Further reading

External links