Two Lost Books By An Ancient Greek Mathematician Have Survived In An Arabic Manuscript
Two lost books by Apollonius, the ancient Greek mathematician known as “The Great Geometer,” have survived in an Arabic manuscript preserved at the Libraries of Leiden University in the Netherlands.
The manuscript had been forgotten in the library. It was part of a collection of nearly 200 manuscripts brought to the university by the famous Dutch Orientalist and mathematician Jacob Golius during his travels to the Middle East in the 17th century.
The rediscovered manuscript contains the lost fifth and seventh books of the volume “The Conics of Apollonius,” one of the most profound works of ancient Greek mathematics.
The Conics introduces geometric concepts like hyperbolas, parabolas, and ellipses—the curves you can see when shining a flashlight on a wall.
Apollonius’ work is made up of eight books, but European scholars only had access to the first four during the Renaissance. The rest were considered lost for centuries.
Apollonius was born around 260 B.C.E. in the ancient Greek city of Perga in Pamphylia, located in Asia Minor. He studied and taught in Alexandria.
The surviving 11th-century Arabic manuscript is a translation of books five to seven by Thabit ibn Qurra and edited by the Banū Mūsā brothers. It is adorned with colorful illustrations and Arabic calligraphy that detail the history of mathematics.
“The calligraphy in some of these manuscripts is wonderful and also the geometrical figures were written with extreme care,” said Jan Pieter Hogendijk, a Dutch mathematician and historian of science.
“They (manuscripts) are a witness of the mental abilities, discipline, power of concentration, willpower, and so on which the scientists and also the scribes possessed, and which modern people, spoiled by their gadgets, mobile phones, and so on, do not possess anymore.”
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
Arabic manuscripts serve as records of the intellectual achievements of Islamic civilization, particularly in mathematics and geometry.
Therefore, it is important that they are preserved. Despite their importance, many Arabic manuscripts have not been examined thoroughly.
Proper analysis of the works requires fluency in languages like Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Researchers have managed to find that some of the texts included a touch of fantasy among accounts of scientific traditions that were popular with Arabs and Muslims in the Middle Ages.
“They (the texts) were often mixed with legendary accounts, especially in reports about the outer edges of the known world, where the laws of nature were no longer fixed and strange things might occur,” wrote the researchers.
“There, women might grow on trees, people might have arms where we have our ears, and might come across islands exclusively inhabited either by women or by men. All this has left its traces in the Middle Eastern written heritage, and also in the accompanying pictorial tradition.”
The findings were published in the volume Prophets, Poets, and Scholars.
More About:News
Read This Next
