Ali Ahmad Nasawi

Abu l'Hasan Ali ibn Ahmad Al-Nasawi, also spelled Nasavi, (1010 – 1075), was a Persian mathematician from Khurasan, Iran.

He flourished under the Buwayhid sultan Majd al-dowleh, who died in 1029–30AD, and under his successor. He wrote a book on arithmetic in Persian, and then Arabic, entitled the "Satisfying (or Convincing) on Hindu Calculation" (al-muqni fi-l-hisab al hindi). He also wrote on Archimedes's lemmata and Menelaus's theorem (Kitab al-ishba, or "satiation"). where he made corrections to The Lemmata as translated into Arabic by Thabit ibn Qurra, which was last revised by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi.

Nasawi's arithmetic explains the division of fractions and the extraction of square and cubic roots (square root of 57,342; cubic root of 3, 652, 296) almost in the modern manner. It is remarkable that al-Nasawi replaces sexagesimal by decimal fractions.

Source #2 given below also gives an analysis of a mid-12th century manuscript in which a summary of Euclid's Elements exists by al-Nasawi.

He is thought to have died in about 1075AD in Baghdad, Iraq.

See also

• List of Iranian scientists

Sources

1. Suter: Die Mathematiker und Astronomen der Araber (96, 1900) Uber das Rechenbuch des Ali ben Ahmed el-Nasawi (Bibliotheca Mathematica, vol. 7, 113–119, 1906).
2. J Ragep and E S Kennedy, A description of Zahiriyya (Damascus) MS 4871 : a philosophical and scientific collection, J. Hist. Arabic Sci. 5 (1–2) (1981), 85–108.

External link

• Nasawi's bio from St Andrew's School of Mathematics, Scotland.