Abū Ḥātim al-Muẓaffar al-Isfazārī ( fl. late 11th or early 12th century) was an Islamic

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 ...

astronomer An astronomer is a scientist in the field of astronomy who focuses their studies on a specific question or field outside the scope of Earth. They observe astronomical objects such as stars, planets, moons, comets and galaxies – in either ...

and engineer from Khurasan. According to the historian and geographer

Ibn al-Athir Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ash-Shaybānī, better known as ʿAlī ʿIzz ad-Dīn Ibn al-Athīr al-Jazarī ( ar, علي عز الدین بن الاثیر الجزري) lived 1160–1233) was an Arab or Kurdish historian a ...

and the

polymath A polymath ( el, πολυμαθής, , "having learned much"; la, homo universalis, "universal human") is an individual whose knowledge spans a substantial number of subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific pro ...

Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi Qotb al-Din Mahmoud b. Zia al-Din Mas'ud b. Mosleh Shirazi (1236–1311) ( fa, قطب‌الدین محمود بن ضیاالدین مسعود بن مصلح شیرازی) was a 13th-century Persian polymath and poet who made contributions to a ...

, he worked in the Seljuq observatory of Isfahan. The Persian writer Nezami Aruzi met him in Balkh in (in present‐day Afghanistan) in 1112 or 1113. He was a contemporary of Umar al-Khayyam and Abd al-Raḥmān al-Khāzinī. He main work is entitled ''Irshād dhawī al-cirfān ilā ṣinācat al-qaffān'' (Guiding the possessors of learning in the art of the steelyard), a relatively long text on the theory of the steelyard balance with unequal arms. His other surviving works include a summary of

Euclid's Elements The ''Elements'' ( grc, Στοιχεῖα ''Stoikheîa'') is a mathematical treatise consisting of 13 books attributed to the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid in Alexandria, Ptolemaic Egypt 300 BC. It is a collection of definitions, postulat ...

, a text on geometrical measurements, and a treatise on meteorology in

Persian language Persian (), also known by its endonym Farsi (, ', ), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken a ...

. Al-Isfazārī's corpus of mechanics is composed of two sets of texts, which have been published in ''Matn al-Muẓaffar al-Isfazārī fī cilmay al-aṯqāl wa’l-ḥiyal'' by the Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation.

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