Archimedes Among the Ottomans: An Updated Survey

İhsan Fazlıoğlu and F. Jamil Ragep

A chapter in From Alexandria, Through Baghdad, 2014, pp 239-253 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This paper provides a survey of Archimedean material that was produced and disseminated during the Ottoman period, mainly in the city of Istanbul. Moving from the founding figures of Ottoman science such as Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī and Muḥlammad al-Fanā in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to Muṣṭafā Ṣidqī in the eighteenth-century, the article discusses Ottoman work in several areas of Archimedean mathematics and science: 1) the number Pi; 2) Hydrostatics and Specific Gravity of Elements, for which an edition of a unique manuscript by Taqī al-Dīn al-Rāṣid is given in an appendix; 3) Geometry (e.g. the sphere and cylinder, squaring the circle, trisecting an acute angle, heptasecting a circle, and spiral lines). From an examination of the content of texts and extant manuscript witnesses, it is clear that Ottoman work on the Archimedean corpus owed a great debt to émigreé scholars and was closely connected with major Islamic centers oflearning such as the Marāgha Observatory and the Samarqand School; at the same time Ottoman scholars themselves made numerous contributions to the Archimedean heritage.

Keywords: Specific Gravity; Acute Angle; Geometrical Algebra; Fifteenth Century; Mathematical Work (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-642-36736-6_12

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-36736-6_12

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