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

Khurasan Greater Khorāsān,Dabeersiaghi, Commentary on Safarnâma-e Nâsir Khusraw, 6th Ed. Tehran, Zavvâr: 1375 (Solar Hijri Calendar) 235–236 or Khorāsān ( pal, Xwarāsān; fa, خراسان ), is a historical eastern region in the Iranian Plat ...

– c. 1075 in

Baghdad Baghdad (; ar, بَغْدَاد , ) is the capital of Iraq and the second-largest city in the Arab world after Cairo. It is located on the Tigris near the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon and the Sassanid Persian capital of Ctesiphon ...

) was a Persian

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, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

from

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...

. He flourished under the

Buwayhid The Buyid dynasty ( fa, آل بویه, Āl-e Būya), also spelled Buwayhid ( ar, البويهية, Al-Buwayhiyyah), was a Shia Iranian dynasty of Daylamite origin, which mainly ruled over Iraq and central and southern Iran from 934 to 1062. Coup ...

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

arithmetic Arithmetic () is an elementary part of mathematics that consists of the study of the properties of the traditional operations on numbers— addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponentiation, and extraction of roots. In the 19th ...

in Persian, and then

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

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

Archimedes Archimedes of Syracuse (;; ) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor from the ancient city of Syracuse in Sicily. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientis ...

's ''

Book of Lemmas The ''Book of Lemmas'' or ''Book of Assumptions'' (Arabic ''Maʾkhūdhāt Mansūba ilā Arshimīdis'') is a book attributed to Archimedes by Thābit ibn Qurra, though the authorship of the book is questionable. It consists of fifteen propositio ...

'' and

Menelaus's theorem Menelaus's theorem, named for Menelaus of Alexandria, is a proposition about triangles in plane geometry. Suppose we have a triangle ''ABC'', and a transversal line that crosses ''BC'', ''AC'', and ''AB'' at points ''D'', ''E'', and ''F'' respe ...

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

Thabit ibn Qurra Thabit ( ar, ) is an Arabic name for males that means "the imperturbable one". It is sometimes spelled Thabet. People with the patronymic * Ibn Thabit, Libyan hip-hop musician * Asim ibn Thabit, companion of Muhammad * Hassan ibn Sabit (died 674 ...

and last revised by

Nasir al-Din al-Tusi Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Tūsī ( fa, محمد ابن محمد ابن حسن طوسی 18 February 1201 – 26 June 1274), better known as Nasir al-Din al-Tusi ( fa, نصیر الدین طوسی, links=no; or simply Tusi in the West ...

. Al-Nasawī's arithmetic explains the division of

fractions A fraction (from la, fractus, "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 ...

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 or sexagenary, is a numeral system with sixty as its 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 form ...

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 of the Hindu–Arabic numeral ...

. 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 (; grc-gre, Εὐκλείδης; 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 ...

's ''Elements'' exists by al-Nasawī.

References

External links

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

Further reading

References

External links