Banu musa brothers biography of mahatma

From: Thomas Hockey et al. New York: Springer, , pp. Josep Casulleras. It is quite impossible to write separate biographies of them. This allowed them to devote a great deal of their acquired fortune to sponsoring scientific research.

Banu musa brothers biography of mahatma

They actively sought classical works by ancient writers and sent agents or went themselves to Byzantium to purchase manuscripts that they translated on returning to Baghdad. V, Math. Moscow, , - Additional Resources show. Secondary Literature. Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur , I Leiden, , p. Leipzig, , pp. See also E. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. Banu Musa was the name of three brothers, Jafar, Ahmad, and Al-Hasan, all important ninth-century Arab mathematicians who continued and expanded the mathematics developed by the early Greeks.

The three brothers received an excellent education in Baghdad, where they studied geometry, mathematics, and astronomy. Their scientific contributions included the concept of geometric proofs, as well as their accurate measurement of the length of a year days and 6 hours long. Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia.

Banu Musa gale. Banu Musa fl. More From encyclopedia. About this article Banu Musa All Sources -. Updated Aug 13 About encyclopedia. Bantu languages. There are many similarities in the methods employed by the Banu Musa and those employed by Archimedes. More significant, however, is the fact that there are also many differences which, although at first sight may not seem of major importance, yet were providing the first steps towards a new approach to mathematics.

The Banu Musa apply the method of exhaustion invented by Eudoxus and used so effectively by Archimedes. Rather they chose to use a proposition which itself required this passage to infinity in its proof. This in itself may not have been a step forward for, as the author of [ 2 ] suggests, this may have been due to a lack of understanding of the finer points of Greek geometric thinking.

As used by the Banu Musa the "method of exhaustion" loses most of its subtlety and power. In another aspect, however, the Banu Musa made a definite step forward. The Greeks had not thought of areas and volumes as numbers, but had only compared ratios of areas etc. The Banu Musa's concept of number is broader than that of the Greeks. In the text areas as described as products of linear magnitudes, so the terminology of arithmetic is perhaps for the first time applied to the operations of geometry.

The Banu Musa also introduce geometrical proofs which involve thinking of the geometric objects as moving. In particular they used kinematic methods to solve the classical problem of trisecting an angle. In astronomy the brothers made many contributions. They were instructed by al-Ma'mun to measure a degree of latitude and they made their measurements in the desert in northern Mesopotamia.

They also made many observations of the sun and the moon from Baghdad.