Abu l'Hasan Ali ibn Ahmad Al-Nasawi (Arabic: أبو الحسن علي بن أحمد النسوي), also spelled Nasavi, (1010 - 1075), was a Persian mathematician from Khurasan, now Afghanistan and Iran. The Arabic language (; , less formally, ) is the largest member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (classification: South Central Semitic) and is closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. ... Events The Ly Dynasty in Vietnam is established (or 1009). ... Events Revolt of the Earls. ... Khorasan (also spelled Khurasan and Khorassan; خراسان in Persian) is an area, located in eastern and northeastern 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. The Buwayhids were a Shiite Muslim tribal confederation from the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. ... Archimedes of Syracuse. ... Menelaus (also transliterated as Meneláos), in Greek mythology, was a king of Sparta and son of Atreus and Aerope. ... Abul Hasan Thabit ibn Qurra ibn Marwan al-Sabi al-Harrani, (826 – February 18, 901) was an Arab astronomer and mathematician. ... Nasir Tusi or Abu Jafar Muhammad Ibn Muhammad Ibn al-Hasan Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201–1274, near Baghdad) was a Persian scientist, of Shia islamic belief, born in Tus, Khorasan (then Persia, present time Iran). ...

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. The sexagesimal (base-sixty) is a numeral system with sixty as the base. ...

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. Euclid Euclid of Alexandria (Greek: ) (ca. ...

He is thought to have died in about 1075 A.D. in Baghdad, Iraq. Average temperature (red) and precipitations (blue) in Baghdad Baghdad (Arabic: ) is the capital of Iraq and of Baghdad Province. ...

See also

• List of Iranian scientists

Photo taken from medieval manuscript by Qotbeddin Shirazi. ...

Sources

1. Sufer: 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.