ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad al-Nasawī (c. 1010 possibly in Nasa, Khurasan – c. 1075 in Baghdad) was a Persian mathematician from Khurasan, Iran. He flourished under the Buwayhid sultan Majd al-dowleh, who died in 1029-30AD, and under his successor. He wrote a book on arithmetic in Persian, and then Arabic, entitled the "Satisfying (or Convincing) on Hindu Calculation" (al-muqni fi-l-hisab al Hindi). He also wrote on Archimedes's lemmata and Menelaus's theorem (Kitab al-ishba, or "satiation"). where he made corrections to The Lemmata as translated into Arabic by Thabit ibn Qurra, which was last revised by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi.
Al-Nasawī's arithmetic explains the division of fractions 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 by decimal fractions.
Al-Nasawī's criticises earlier authors, but in many cases invalidly. His work was not original, and he sometimes writes of matters that he does not understand, e.g. "borrowing" in subtraction.[1]
Ragep and Kennedy also give an analysis of a mid-12th century manuscript in which a summary of Euclid's Elements exists by al-Nasawī.
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