Reporters: Divina M. Taro and Devine T.
Cagatin
Course/Year: BSED-MATH 1
ISLAMIC MATHEMATICS
Some examples of the complex symmetries
used in Islamic temple decoration
The Islamic Empire established across Persia,
the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa, Iberia and
parts of India from the 8th Century onwards made
significant contributions towards mathematics. They
were able to draw on and fuse together the
mathematical developments of both Greece and India.
Some examples of the complex symmetries used in
Islamic temple decoration.
One consequence of the Islamic prohibition
on depicting the human form was the extensive use of complex geometric patterns to decorate their
buildings, raising mathematics to the form of an art. In fact, over time, Muslim artists discovered all the
different forms of symmetry that can be depicted on a 2-dimensional surface.
The Qu’ran itself encouraged the accumulation of knowledge, and a Golden Age of Islamic
science and mathematics flourished throughout the medieval period from the 9th to 15th Centuries. The
House of Wisdom was set up in Baghdad around 810, and work started almost immediately on
translating the major Greek and Indian mathematical and astronomy works into Arabic.
The outstanding Persian mathematician Muhammad Al-Khwarizmi was an early Director of the
House of Wisdom in the 9th Century, and one of the greatest of early Muslim mathematicians. Perhaps
Al-Khwarizmi’s most important contribution to mathematics was his strong advocacy of the Hindu
numerical system (1 – 9 and 0), which he recognized as having the power and efficiency needed to
revolutionize Islamic (and, later, Western) mathematics, and which was soon adopted by the entire
Islamic world, and later by Europe as well.
Al-Khwarizmi‘s other important contribution was algebra, and he introduced the fundamental
algebraic methods of “reduction” and “balancing” and provided an exhaustive account of solving
polynomial equations up to the second degree. In this way, he helped create the powerful abstract
mathematical language still used across the world today, and allowed a much more general way of
analyzing problems other than just the specific problems previously considered by the Indians and
Chinese.
The 10th Century Persian mathematician Muhammad Al-Karaji worked to extend algebra still
further, freeing it from its geometrical heritage, and introduced the theory of algebraic calculus. Al-
Karaji was the first to use the method of proof by mathematical induction to prove his results, by
proving that the first statement in an infinite sequence of statements is true, and then proving that, if
any one statement in the sequence is true, then so is the next one.
Binomial Theorem
Among other things, Al-Karaji used
mathematical induction to prove the binomial
theorem. A binomial is a simple type of algebraic
expression which has just two terms which are
operated on only by addition, subtraction,
multiplication and positive whole-number exponents,
such as (x + y)2. The co-efficients needed when a
binomial is expanded form a symmetrical triangle,
usually referred to as Pascal’s Triangle after the 17th
Century French mathematician Blaise Pascal, although
many other mathematicians had studied it centuries
before him in India, Persia, China and Italy, including
Al-Karaji.
Binomial Theorem
Some hundred years after Al-Karaji, Omar Khayyam (perhaps better known as a poet and the
writer of the “Rubaiyat”, but an important mathematician and astronomer in his own right) generalized
Indian methods for extracting square and cube roots to include fourth, fifth and higher roots in the early
12th Century. He carried out a systematic analysis of cubic problems, revealing there were actually
several different sorts of cubic equations. Although he did in fact succeed in solving cubic equations, and
although he is usually credited with identifying the foundations of algebraic geometry, he was held back
from further advances by his inability to separate the algebra from the geometry, and a purely algebraic
method for the solution of cubic equations had to wait another 500 years and the Italian
mathematicians del Ferro and Tartaglia.
Spherical Trigonometry
The 13th Century Persian astronomer, scientist and
mathematician Nasir Al-Din Al-Tusi was perhaps the first to
treat trigonometry as a separate mathematical discipline,
distinct from astronomy. Building on earlier work by Greek
mathematicians such as Menelaus of Alexandria and Indian
work on the sine function, he gave the first extensive
exposition of spherical trigonometry, including listing the six
distinct cases of a right triangle in spherical trigonometry. One
of his major mathematical contributions was the formulation
of the famous law of sines for plane triangles, a⁄(sin A) = b⁄(sin
B) = c⁄(sin C), although the sine law for spherical triangles had
been discovered earlier by the 10th Century Persians Abul
Wafa Buzjani and Abu Nasr Mansur. Al-Tusi was a pioneer in the field of
Spherical trigonometry
Other medieval Muslim mathematicians worthy of note include:
the 9th Century Arab Thabit ibn Qurra, who developed a general formula by which amicable
numbers could be derived, re-discovered much later by both Fermat and Descartes(amicable
numbers are pairs of numbers for which the sum of the divisors of one number equals the other
number, e.g. the proper divisors of 220 are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55 and 110, of which the
sum is 284; and the proper divisors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71, and 142, of which the sum is 220);
the 10th Century Arab mathematician Abul Hasan al-Uqlidisi, who wrote the earliest surviving
text showing the positional use of Arabic numerals, and particularly the use of decimals instead
of fractions (e.g. 7.375 insead of 73⁄8);
the 10th Century Arab geometer Ibrahim ibn Sinan, who continued Archimedes‘ investigations
of areas and volumes, as well as on tangents of a circle;
the 11th Century Persian Ibn al-Haytham (also known as Alhazen), who, in addition to his
groundbreaking work on optics and physics, established the beginnings of the link between
algebra and geometry, and devised what is now known as “Alhazen’s problem” (he was the first
mathematician to derive the formula for the sum of the fourth powers, using a method that is
readily generalizable); and
the 13th Century Persian Kamal al-Din al-Farisi, who applied the theory of conic sections to solve
optical problems, as well as pursuing work in number theory such as on amicable numbers,
factorization and combinatorial methods;
the 13th Century Moroccan Ibn al-Banna al-Marrakushi, whose works included topics such as
computing square roots and the theory of continued fractions, as well as the discovery of the
first new pair of amicable numbers since ancient times (17,296 and 18,416, later re-discovered
by Fermat) and the the first use of algebraic notation since Brahmagupta.
With the stifling influence of the Turkish Ottoman Empire from the 14th or 15th Century onwards,
Islamic mathematics stagnated, and further developments moved to Europe.
