Passage through Islam

Two centuries after they broke out of their desert around Mecca, the followers of Muhammad occupied the lands from Persia to Spain and settled down to master the arts and sciences of the peoples they had conquered. They admired especially the works of the Greek mathematicians and physicians and the philosophy of Aristotle. By the late 9th century they were already able to add to the geometry of Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius. In the 10th century they went beyond Ptolemy. Stimulated by the problem of finding the effective orientation for prayer (the qiblah, or direction from the place of worship to Mecca), Islamic geometers and astronomers developed the stereographic projection (invented to project the celestial sphere onto a two-dimensional map or instrument) as well as plane and spherical trigonometry. Here they incorporated elements derived from India as well as from Greece. Their achievements in geometry and geometrical astronomy materialized in instruments for drawing conic sections and, above all, in the beautiful brass astrolabes with which they reduced to the turn of a dial the toil of calculating astronomical quantities.

Thābit ibn Qurrah (836–901) had precisely the attributes required to bring the geometry of the Arabs up to the mark set by the Greeks. As a member of a religious sect close but hostile to both Jews and Christians, he knew Syriac and Greek as well as Arabic; as a money changer, he knew how to calculate; as both, he recommended himself to the Banū Mūsā, a set of mathematician brothers descended from a robber who had diversified into astrology. The Banū Mūsā directed a House of Wisdom in Baghdad sponsored by the caliph. There they presided over translations of the Greek classics. Thābit became an ornament of the House of Wisdom. He translated Archimedes and Apollonius, some of whose books now are known only in his versions. In a notable addition to Euclid, he tried valiantly to prove the parallel postulate (discussed later in Non-Euclidean geometries).

Among the pieces of Greek geometrical astronomy that the Arabs made their own was the planispheric astrolabe, which incorporated one of the methods of projecting the celestial sphere onto a two-dimensional surface invented in ancient Greece. One of the desirable mathematical features of this method (the stereographic projection) is that it converts circles into circles or straight lines, a property proved in the first pages of Apollonius’s Conics. As Ptolemy showed in his Planisphaerium, the fact that the stereographic projection maps circles into circles or straight lines makes the astrolabe a very convenient instrument for reckoning time and representing the motions of celestial bodies. The earliest known Arabic astrolabes and manuals for their construction date from the 9th century. The Islamic world improved the astrolabe as an aid for determining the time for prayers, for finding the direction to Mecca, and for astrological divination.

Europe rediscovers the classics

Contacts among Christians, Jews, and Arabs in Catalonia brought knowledge of the astrolabe to the West before the year 1000. During the 12th century many manuals for its use and construction were translated into Latin along with geometrical works by the Banū Mūsā, Thābit, and others. Some of the achievements of the Arab geometers were rediscovered in the West after wide and close study of Euclid’s Elements, which was translated repeatedly from the Arabic and once from the Greek in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Elements (Venice, 1482) was one of the first technical books ever printed. Archimedes also came West in the 12th century, in Latin translations from Greek and Arabic sources. Apollonius arrived only by bits and pieces. Ptolemy’s Almagest appeared in Latin manuscript in 1175. Not until the humanists of the Renaissance turned their classical learning to mathematics, however, did the Greeks come out in standard printed editions in both Latin and Greek.

These texts affected their Latin readers with the strength of revelation. Europeans discovered the notion of proof, the power of generalization, and the superhuman cleverness of the Greeks; they hurried to master techniques that would enable them to improve their calendars and horoscopes, fashion better instruments, and raise Christian mathematicians to the level of the infidels. It took more than two centuries for the Europeans to make their unexpected heritage their own. By the 15th century, however, they were prepared to go beyond their sources. The most novel developments occurred where creativity was strongest, in the art of the Italian Renaissance.

Linear perspective

The theory of linear perspective, the brainchild of the Florentine architect-engineers Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) and their followers, was to help remake geometry during the 17th century. The scheme of Brunelleschi and Alberti, as given without proofs in Alberti’s De pictura (1435; On Painting), exploits the pyramid of rays that, according to what they had learned from the Westernized versions of the optics of Ibn Al-Haytham (c. 965–1040), proceeds from the object to the painter’s eye. Imagine, as Alberti directed, that the painter studies a scene through a window, using only one eye and not moving his head; he cannot know whether he looks at an external scene or at a glass painted to present to his eye the same visual pyramid. Supposing this decorated window to be the canvas, Alberti interpreted the painting-to-be as the projection of the scene in life onto a vertical plane cutting the visual pyramid. A distinctive feature of his system was the “point at infinity” at which parallel lines in the painting appear to converge.

Alberti’s procedure, as developed by Piero della Francesca (c. 1410–92) and Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), was used by many artists who wished to render perspective persuasively. At the same time, cartographers tried various projections of the sphere to accommodate the record of geographical discoveries that began in the mid-15th century with Portuguese exploration of the west coast of Africa. Coincidentally with these explorations, mapmakers recovered Ptolemy’s Geography, in which he had recorded by latitude (sometimes near enough) and longitude (usually far off) the principal places known to him and indicated how they could be projected onto a map.

The discoveries that enlarged the known Earth did not fit easily on Ptolemy’s projections. Cartographers therefore adopted the stereographic projection that had served astronomers. Several projected the Northern Hemisphere onto the Equator just as in the standard astrolabe, but the most widely used aspect, popularized in the world maps made by Gerardus Mercator’s son for later editions of his father’s atlas (beginning in 1595), projected points on the Earth onto a cylinder tangent to the Earth at the Equator. After cutting the cylinder along a vertical line and flattening the resulting rectangle, the result was the now-familiar Mercator map.

The intense cultivation of methods of projection by artists, architects, and cartographers during the Renaissance eventually provoked mathematicians into considering the properties of linear perspective in general. The most profound of these generalists was a sometime architect named Girard Desargues (1591–1661).