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Origins
In Hellenistic times and in late antiquity, scientific learning in the eastern part of the Roman world was spread over a variety of centres, and Justinian’s closing of the pagan academies in Athens in 529 gave further impetus to this diffusion. An additional factor was the translation and study of Greek scientific and philosophical texts sponsored both by monastic centres of the various Christian churches in the Levant, Egypt, and Mesopotamia and by enlightened rulers of the Sāsānian dynasty in places like the medical school at Gondeshapur.
Also important were developments in India in the first few centuries ce. Although the decimal system for whole numbers was apparently not known to the Indian astronomer Aryabhata (born 476), it was used by his pupil Bhaskara I in 620, and by 670 the system had reached northern Mesopotamia, where the Nestorian bishop Severus Sebokht praised its Hindu inventors as discoverers of things more ingenious than those of the Greeks. Earlier, in the late 4th or early 5th century, the anonymous Hindu author of an astronomical handbook, the Surya Siddhanta, had tabulated the sine function (unknown in Greece) for every 33/4° of arc from 33/4° to 90°. (See South Asian mathematics.)
Within this intellectual context the rapid expansion of Islam took place between the time of Muḥammad’s return to Mecca in 630 from his exile in Medina and the Muslim conquest of lands extending from Spain to the borders of China by 715. Not long afterward, Muslims began the acquisition of foreign learning, and, by the time of the caliph al-Manṣūr (died 775), such Indian and Persian astronomical material as the Brahma-sphuta-siddhanta and the Shah’s Tables had been translated into Arabic. The subsequent acquisition of Greek material was greatly advanced when the caliph al-Maʾmūn constructed a translation and research centre, the House of Wisdom, in Baghdad during his reign (813–833). Most of the translations were done from Greek and Syriac by Christian scholars, but the impetus and support for this activity came from Muslim patrons. These included not only the caliph but also wealthy individuals such as the three brothers known as the Banū Mūsā, whose treatises on geometry and mechanics formed an important part of the works studied in the Islamic world.
Of Euclid’s works the Elements, the Data, the Optics, the Phaenomena, and On Divisions were translated. Of Archimedes’ works only two—Sphere and Cylinder and Measurement of the Circle—are known to have been translated, but these were sufficient to stimulate independent researches from the 9th to the 15th century. On the other hand, virtually all of Apollonius’s works were translated, and of Diophantus and Menelaus one book each, the Arithmetica and the Sphaerica, respectively, were translated into Arabic. Finally, the translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest furnished important astronomical material.
Of the minor writings, Diocles’ treatise on mirrors, Theodosius’s Spherics, Pappus’s work on mechanics, Ptolemy’s Planisphaerium, and Hypsicles’ treatises on regular polyhedra (the so-called Books XIV and XV of Euclid’s Elements) were among those translated.
Mathematics in the 9th century
Thābit ibn Qurrah (836–901), a Sabian from Ḥarrān in northern Mesopotamia, was an important translator and reviser of these Greek works. In addition to translating works of the major Greek mathematicians (for the Banū Mūsā, among others), he was a court physician. He also translated Nicomachus of Gerasa’s Arithmetic and discovered a beautiful rule for finding amicable numbers, a pair of numbers such that each number is the sum of the set of proper divisors of the other number. The investigation of such numbers formed a continuing tradition in Islam. Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fārisī (died c. 1320) gave the pair 17,926 and 18,416 as an example of Thābit’s rule, and in the 17th century Muḥammad Bāqir Yazdī gave the pair 9,363,584 and 9,437,056.
One scientist typical of the 9th century was Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Working in the House of Wisdom, he introduced Indian material in his astronomical works and also wrote an early book explaining Hindu arithmetic, the Book of Addition and Subtraction According to the Hindu Calculation. In another work, the Book of Restoring and Balancing, he provided a systematic introduction to algebra, including a theory of quadratic equations. Both works had important consequences for Islamic mathematics. Hindu Calculation began a tradition of arithmetic books that, by the middle of the next century, led to the invention of decimal fractions (complete with a decimal point), and Restoring and Balancing became the point of departure and model for later writers such as the Egyptian Abū Kāmil. Both books were translated into Latin, and Restoring and Balancing was the origin of the word algebra, from the Arabic word for “restoring” in its title (al-jabr). The Hindu Calculation, from a Latin form of the author’s name, algorismi, yielded the word algorithm.
Al-Khwārizmī’s algebra also served as a model for later writers in its application of arithmetic and algebra to the distribution of inheritances according to the complex requirements of Muslim religious law. This tradition of service to the Islamic faith was an enduring feature of mathematical work in Islam and one that, in the eyes of many, justified the study of secular learning. In the same category are al-Khwārizmī’s method of calculating the time of visibility of the new moon (which signals the beginning of the Muslim month) and the expositions by astronomers of methods for finding the direction to Mecca for the five daily prayers.
Mathematics in the 10th century
Islamic scientists in the 10th century were involved in three major mathematical projects: the completion of arithmetic algorithms, the development of algebra, and the extension of geometry.
The first of these projects led to the appearance of three complete numeration systems, one of which was the finger arithmetic used by the scribes and treasury officials. This ancient arithmetic system, which became known throughout the East and Europe, employed mental arithmetic and a system of storing intermediate results on the fingers as an aid to memory. (Its use of unit fractions recalls the Egyptian system.) During the 10th and 11th centuries capable mathematicians, such as Abūʾl-Wafāʾ (940–997/998), wrote on this system, but it was eventually replaced by the decimal system.
A second common system was the base-60 numeration inherited from the Babylonians via the Greeks and known as the arithmetic of the astronomers. Although astronomers used this system for their tables, they usually converted numbers to the decimal system for complicated calculations and then converted the answer back to sexagesimals.
The third system was Indian arithmetic, whose basic numeral forms, complete with the zero, eastern Islam took over from the Hindus. (Different forms of the numerals, whose origins are not entirely clear, were used in western Islam.) The basic algorithms also came from India, but these were adapted by al-Uqlīdisī (c. 950) to pen and paper instead of the traditional dust board, a move that helped to popularize this system. Also, the arithmetic algorithms were completed in two ways: by the extension of root-extraction procedures, known to Hindus and Greeks only for square and cube roots, to roots of higher degree and by the extension of the Hindu decimal system for whole numbers to include decimal fractions. These fractions appear simply as computational devices in the work of both al-Uqlīdisī and al-Baghdādī (c. 1000), but in subsequent centuries they received systematic treatment as a general method. As for extraction of roots, Abūʾl-Wafāʾ wrote a treatise (now lost) on the topic, and Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) solved the general problem of extracting roots of any desired degree. Omar’s treatise too is lost, but the method is known from other writers, and it appears that a major step in its development was al-Karajī’s 10th-century derivation by means of mathematical induction of the binomial theorem for whole-number exponents—i.e., his discovery that
During the 10th century Islamic algebraists progressed from al-Khwārizmī’s quadratic polynomials to the mastery of the algebra of expressions involving arbitrary positive or negative integral powers of the unknown. Several algebraists explicitly stressed the analogy between the rules for working with powers of the unknown in algebra and those for working with powers of 10 in arithmetic, and there was interaction between the development of arithmetic and algebra from the 10th to the 12th century. A 12th-century student of al-Karajī’s works, al-Samawʿal, was able to approximate the quotient (20x2 + 30x)/(6x2 + 12) as![as-Samaw'al quotient (20x[squared] + 30x)/(6x[squared] +12)](https://cdn.britannica.com/03/15303-004-F247AF5A/as-Samawal-quotient.jpg)
and also gave a rule for finding the coefficients of the successive powers of 1/x. Although none of this employed symbolic algebra, algebraic symbolism was in use by the 14th century in the western part of the Islamic world. The context for this well-developed symbolism was, it seems, commentaries that were destined for teaching purposes, such as that of Ibn Qunfūdh (1330–1407) of Algeria on the algebra of Ibn al-Bannāʿ (1256–1321) of Morocco.
Other parts of algebra developed as well. Both Greeks and Hindus had studied indeterminate equations, and the translation of this material and the application of the newly developed algebra led to the investigation of Diophantine equations by writers like Abū Kāmil, al-Karajī, and Abū Jaʿfar al-Khāzin (first half of 10th century), as well as to attempts to prove a special case of what is now known as Fermat’s last theorem—namely, that there are no rational solutions to x3 + y3 = z3. The great scientist Ibn al-Haytham (965–1040) solved problems involving congruences by what is now called Wilson’s theorem, which states that, if p is a prime, then p divides (p − 1) × (p − 2)⋯× 2 × 1 + 1, and al-Baghdādī gave a variant of the idea of amicable numbers by defining two numbers to “balance” if the sums of their divisors are equal.
However, not only arithmetic and algebra but geometry too underwent extensive development. Thābit ibn Qurrah, his grandson Ibrāhīm ibn Sinān (909–946), Abū Sahl al-Kūhī (died c. 995), and Ibn al-Haytham solved problems involving the pure geometry of conic sections, including the areas and volumes of plane and solid figures formed from them, and also investigated the optical properties of mirrors made from conic sections. Ibrāhīm ibn Sinān, Abu Sahl al-Kūhī, and Ibn al-Haytham used the ancient technique of analysis to reduce the solution of problems to constructions involving conic sections. (Ibn al-Haytham, for example, used this method to find the point on a convex spherical mirror at which a given object is seen by a given observer.) Thābit and Ibrāhīm showed how to design the curves needed for sundials. Abūʾl-Wafāʾ, whose book on the arithmetic of the scribes is mentioned above, also wrote on geometric methods needed by artisans.
In addition, in the late 10th century Abūʾl-Wafāʾ and the prince Abū Naṣr Manṣur stated and proved theorems of plane and spherical geometry that could be applied by astronomers and geographers, including the laws of sines and tangents. Abū Naṣr’s pupil al-Bīrūnī (973–1048), who produced a vast amount of high-quality work, was one of the masters in applying these theorems to astronomy and to such problems in mathematical geography as the determination of latitudes and longitudes, the distances between cities, and the direction from one city to another.
Omar Khayyam
The mathematician and poet Omar Khayyam was born in Neyshābūr (in Iran) only a few years before al-Bīrūnī’s death. He later lived in Samarkand and Eṣfahān, and his brilliant work there continued many of the main lines of development in 10th-century mathematics. Not only did he discover a general method of extracting roots of arbitrary high degree, but his Algebra contains the first complete treatment of the solution of cubic equations. Omar did this by means of conic sections, but he declared his hope that his successors would succeed where he had failed in finding an algebraic formula for the roots.
Omar was also a part of an Islamic tradition, which included Thābit and Ibn al-Haytham, of investigating Euclid’s parallel postulate. To this tradition Omar contributed the idea of a quadrilateral with two congruent sides perpendicular to the base, as shown in the . The parallel postulate would be proved, Omar recognized, if he could show that the remaining two angles were right angles. In this he failed, but his question about the quadrilateral became the standard way of discussing the parallel postulate.
That postulate, however, was only one of the questions on the foundations of mathematics that interested Islamic scientists. Another was the definition of ratios. Omar Khayyam, along with others before him, felt that the theory in Book V of Euclid’s Elements was logically satisfactory but intuitively unappealing, so he proved that a definition known to Aristotle was equivalent to that given in Euclid. In fact, Omar argued that ratios should be regarded as “ideal numbers,” and so he conceived of a much broader system of numbers than that used since Greek antiquity, that of the positive real numbers.
Islamic mathematics to the 15th century
In the 12th century the physician al-Samawʿal continued and completed the work of al-Karajī in algebra and also provided a systematic treatment of decimal fractions as a means of approximating irrational quantities. In his method of finding roots of pure equations, xn = N, he used what is now known as Horner’s method to expand the binomial (a + y)n. His contemporary Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī late in the 12th century provided a method of approximating the positive roots of arbitrary equations, based on an approach virtually identical to that discovered by François Viète in 16th-century France. The important step here was less the general idea than the development of the numerical algorithms necessary to effect it.
Sharaf al-Dīn was the discoverer of a device, called the linear astrolabe, that places him in another important Islamic mathematical tradition, one that centred on the design of new forms of the ancient astronomical instrument known as the astrolabe. The astrolabe, whose mathematical theory is based on the stereographic projection of the sphere, was invented in late antiquity, but its extensive development in Islam made it the pocket watch of the medievals. In its original form it required a different plate of horizon coordinates for each latitude, but in the 11th century the Spanish Muslim astronomer al-Zarqallu invented a single plate that worked for all latitudes. Slightly earlier, astronomers in the East had experimented with plane projections of the sphere, and al-Bīrūnī invented such a projection that could be used to produce a map of a hemisphere. The culminating masterpiece was the astrolabe of the Syrian Ibn al-Shāṭir (1305–75), a mathematical tool that could be used to solve all the standard problems of spherical astronomy in five different ways.
On the other hand, Muslim astronomers had developed other methods for solving these problems using the highly accurate trigonometry tables and the new trigonometry theorems they had developed. Out of these developments came the creation of trigonometry as a mathematical discipline, separate from its astronomical applications, by Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī at his observatory in Marāgheh in the 13th century. (It was there too that al-Ṭūsī’s pupil Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī [1236–1311] and his pupil Kamāl al-Dīn Fārisī, using Ibn al-Haytham’s great work, the Optics, were able to give the first mathematically satisfactory explanation of the rainbow.)
Al-Ṭūsī’s observatory was supported by a grandson of Genghis Khan, Hülegü, who sacked Baghdad in 1258. Ulūgh Beg, the grandson of the Mongol conqueror Timur, founded an observatory at Samarkand in the early years of the 15th century. Ulūgh Beg was himself a good astronomer, and his tables of sines and tangents for every minute of arc (accurate to five sexagesimal places) were one of the great achievements in numerical mathematics up to his time. He was also the patron of Jamshīd al-Kāshī (died 1429), whose work The Reckoners’ Key summarizes most of the arithmetic of his time and includes sections on algebra and practical geometry as well. Among al-Kāshī’s works is a masterful computation of the value of 2π, which, when expressed in decimal fractions, is accurate to 16 places, as well as the application of a numerical method, now known as fixed-point iteration, for solving the cubic equation with sin 1° as a root. His work was indeed of a quality deserving Ulūgh Beg’s description as “known among the famous of the world.”
Al-Kāshī lived almost five centuries after the first translations of Arabic material into Latin, and by his time the Islamic mathematical tradition had given the West not only its first versions of many of the Greek classics but also a complete set of algorithms for Hindu-Arabic arithmetic, plane and spherical trigonometry, and the powerful tool of algebra. Although mathematical inquiry continued in Islam in the centuries after al-Kāshī’s time, the mathematical centre of gravity was shifting to the West. That this was so is, of course, in no small measure due to what the Western mathematicians had learned from their Islamic predecessors during the preceding centuries.
John L. BerggrenEuropean mathematics during the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Until the 11th century only a small part of the Greek mathematical corpus was known in the West. Because almost no one could read Greek, what little was available came from the poor texts written in Latin in the Roman Empire, together with the very few Latin translations of Greek works. Of these the most important were the treatises by Boethius, who about 500 ce made Latin redactions of a number of Greek scientific and logical writings. His Arithmetic, which was based on Nicomachus, was well known and was the means by which medieval scholars learned of Pythagorean number theory. Boethius and Cassiodorus provided the material for the part of the monastic education called the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music theory. Together with the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric), these subjects formed the seven liberal arts, which were taught in the monasteries, cathedral schools, and, from the 12th century on, universities and which constituted the principal university instruction until modern times.
For monastic life it sufficed to know how to calculate with Roman numerals. The principal application of arithmetic was a method for determining the date of Easter, the computus, that was based on the lunar cycle of 19 solar years (i.e., 235 lunar revolutions) and the 28-year solar cycle. Between the time of Bede (died 735), when the system was fully developed, and about 1500, the computus was reduced to a series of verses that were learned by rote. Until the 12th century, geometry was largely concerned with approximate formulas for measuring areas and volumes in the tradition of the Roman surveyors. About 1000 ce the French scholar Gerbert of Aurillac, later Pope Sylvester II, introduced a type of abacus in which numbers were represented by stones bearing Arabic numerals. Such novelties were known to very few.
