Ahmad ibn 'Abdallah Habash Hasib Marwazi (d. after 869 in Samarra, Iraq ) was a Persian[2] astronomer,[3] geographer, and mathematician from Merv in Khorasan.[citation needed]
He flourished in Baghdad, and died a centenarian after 869. He worked under the Abbasid caliphs al-Ma'mun and al-Mu'tasim.
He made observations from 825 to 835, and compiled three astronomical tables: the first were still in the Hindu manner; the second, called the 'tested" tables, were the most important; they are likely identical with the "Ma'munic" or "Arabic" tables and may be a collective work of al-Ma'mun's astronomers; the third, called tables of the Shah, were smaller.
Apropos of the solar eclipse of 829, Habash gives us the first instance of a determination of time by an altitude (in this case, of the sun); a method which was generally adopted by Muslim astronomers.
In 830, he seems to have introduced the notion of "shadow," umbra (versa), equivalent to our tangent in trigonometry, and he compiled a table of such shadows which seems to be the earliest of its kind. He also introduced the cotangent, and produced the first tables of for it.[4][5]
The Book of Bodies and Distances[edit]
Al-Hasib conducted various observations at the Al-Shammisiyyah observatory in Baghdad and estimated a number of geographic and astronomical values. He compiled his results in The Book of Bodies and Distances, in which some of his results included the following:[6]
- Earth
- Moon
- Moon's diameter: 1886.8 miles (3036.5 km)
- Moon's circumference: 5927.025 miles (9538.622 km)
- Radius of closest distance of Moon: 215,208;9,9 (sexagesimal) miles
- Half-circumference of closest distance of Moon: 676,368;28,45,25,43 (sexagesimal) miles
- Radius of furthest distance of Moon: 205,800;8,45 (sexagesimal) miles
- Diameter of furthest distance of Moon: 411,600.216 miles (662,406.338 km)
- Circumference of furthest distance of Moon: 1,293,600.916 miles (2,081,848.873 km)
- Sun
- Sun's diameter: 35,280;1,30 miles (56,777.6966 km)
- Sun's circumference: 110,880;4,43 miles (178,444.189 km)
- Diameter of orbit of Sun: 7,761,605.5 miles (12,491,093.2 km)
- Circumference of orbit of Sun: 24,392,571.38 miles (39,256,038 km)
- One degree along orbit of Sun: 67,700.05 miles (108,952.67 km)
- One minute along orbit of Sun: 1129.283 miles (1817.405 km)
See also[edit]
- ^ http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/crcc/private/cmje/heritage/History_of_Islamic_Science.pdf
- ^ Islamic Desk Reference, ed. E. J. Van Donzel, (Brill, 1994), 121.
- ^ "trigonometry". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 2008-07-21.
- ^ Jacques Sesiano, "Islamic mathematics", p. 157, in Selin, Helaine; D'Ambrosio, Ubiratan, eds. (2000), Mathematics Across Cultures: The History of Non-western Mathematics, Springer, ISBN 1-4020-0260-2
- ^ Langermann, Y. Tzvi (1985), "The Book of Bodies and Distances of Habash al-Hasib", Centaurus 28 (2): 108–128 [111], doi:10.1111/j.1600-0498.1985.tb00831.x
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Habash Al-Hasib Al-Marwazi |
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Astronomer, Mathematician and geographer |
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874 |
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