Alī ibn Ahmad al-Nasawī

ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad al-Nasawī (c. 1011 possibly in Nasa, Khurasan – c. 1075 in Baghdad) was a Persian[1] 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 incorrectly. His work was not original, and he sometimes writes of matters that he does not understand, e.g. "borrowing" in subtraction.[2]

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.

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ Frye, ed. by R.N. (1975). The Cambridge history of Iran. (Repr. ed.). London: Cambridge U.P. p. 405. ISBN 978-0-521-20093-6.
  2. ↑ O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Abu l'Hasan Ali ibn Ahmad Al-Nasawi", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
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