Islam and Science: Three Great Unknown Arab Mathematicians and Their Contributions

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

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

This was Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Musa al-Jwarizmi, known in Spanish as Al-Huarismi, who lived between about 780 and 850.

Al-Huarismi described the revolutionary idea that you can represent any number with just 10 simple characters.

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 previously considered brilliant new concepts by European mathematicians of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries are now known to have been developed by Arab/Islamic mathematicians some four centuries earlier,” writes John Joshep. O’Connor and Edmund Frederick Robertson of the University of St. Andrews, UK.

“In many ways the mathematics studied today has a style much closer to the Arabic/Islamic contributions than to the style of the Greeks.”

Throughout history there have been great mathematicians from the Arab and Islamic worlds. 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 the salvation of Greek and Latin science through their translations.”

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

“The great significance of Al-Batani is that he managed to combine astronomy and mathematics and make them one field of study,” Martos Quesada told BBC Mundo.

“He applied many mathematical formulas to astronomy. For example, he determined the solar year of 365 days with great accuracy, which was a great achievement, since we are talking about the end of the 9th century and the beginning of the 10th century.

“As for the equinoxes, he studied them and found that there were errors in the calculations made by Ptolemy, and this served to improve the entire Greek heritage of Ptolemy, which the Arab mathematicians received.”

He also introduced a number of trigonometric relations.

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

“The significance of this book is enormous. Copernicus, for the first time since Greek antiquity, states in it that all the planets, including the Earth, revolve around the Sun.

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

Copernicus quotes Mahometi Arasenfis, the great Al-Battani.

“It is a great revelation to me that he directly mentions a ninth-century Muslim who provided him with much information about his observations.”

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

Jaime Kullout Cordero, professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Salamanca, told 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 elaborates that in the 1980s, “researchers discovered Ibn al-Shatir’s planetary models and realized that they were the same as those proposed by Copernicus several centuries later.”

Sheikh Mohammad Razaullah Ansari, professor emeritus of physics at Aligarh Muslim University in India, wrote an article for the UNESCO website about a 10th and 11th century Arab scientist who devoted himself not only to mathematics, but also to physics, mechanics, astronomy, philosophy and medicine.

This is the great Abu Ali al-Hassan ibn al-Haytham al-Basri, known in the West as Alhazen, and in Spanish as Alhasen.

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

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

He is considered the father of the modern scientific method.

He developed a methodology for “experimenting as another way of testing the underlying 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-Manair, in Latin Opticae Thesaurus, which was translated anonymously in the 12th and 13th centuries.”

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

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

“He was one of the first Arab mathematicians to successfully solve equations of degree higher than the second, by geometrically solving the third degree equation, which was formulated by Archimedes in his work “On the Sphere and Cylinder” more than 1200 years ago. “.

In the field of number theory, Alhasen made important contributions with his work on perfect numbers.

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

Ricardo Moreno points out that the death of Al-Khuarismi “approximately coincides with the birth in Egypt of Abu Kamil ibn Aslam ibn Muhammad, nicknamed the Egyptian calculator.”

“He lived for 80 years and left us many mathematical works. Among them is a treatise on algebra, the Arabic original of which has been lost, but of which two translations have come down to us, one in Latin and the other in Hebrew.

“Quadric equations are solved geometrically like its Baghdad predecessor, but they rely more on the Elements.”

According to O’Connor and Robertson’s short biography, very little is known about Abu Kamil’s life.

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

“Kamil was one of the immediate successors of al-Huarismi,” the authors note.

In fact, Kamil himself emphasizes Al-Huarismi’s role as the “inventor of algebra”.

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

“Camille not only played an important role in the development of Arabic algebra, but, thanks to Fibonacci, he was also fundamental in introducing algebra to Europe.”