Mathematics · a Light

The caliph's best mathematician was not a Muslim

Thabit ibn Qurra came from Harran in upper Mesopotamia and belonged to the Sabians, a small community with its own religion and its own regard for the stars. He was working as a money changer when one of the Banu Musa brothers noticed him and brought him to Baghdad. He kept his religion, wrote in Syriac for his own people and in Arabic for the court, and became one of the finest mathematicians of the ninth century. He revised the Arabic Euclid, translated Archimedes and Apollonius, found the area under a parabola by a method close to integration, and gave the first general rule for producing amicable numbers, pairs in which each is the sum of the other's divisors. He died in 901. His son and grandsons were scientists too.

Thabit ibn Qurra · Harran and Baghdad, died 901