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The remarkable Ibn al-Haytham

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2016

John D. Smith
John D. Smith*
Affiliation:
Winchester College, Winchester SO23 9NA
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Extract

‘I saw that I can reach the truth only through concepts whose matter are sensible things and whose form is rational.’

The achievements in experimental and theoretical science of the Arab scholar al-Haytham (also known as Alhazen, from his latinized first name al-Hasan) make him as much a figure of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as of his own tenth and eleventh centuries.

When his writings become known in the West the importance of his contribution to optics was widely recognized and he was studied by Galileo, Kepler, Fermat, Snell and Descartes. Mathematicians remember al-Haytham chiefly for Alhazen's Problem on the reflection of light from a circular mirror, which he solved by the method of conic sections; Huygens, Gregory, l'Hospital, Barrow (and many others) later took up the problem with the new analytical methods of geometry. Al-Haytham also wrote a commentary on the postulates of Euclid, and his attempted proof of the parallel postulate has similarities to Lambert's quadrilateral and Playfair's axiom in the eighteenth century. His theory of cognition may produce yet further interest in his work.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Mathematical Gazette , Volume 76 , Issue 475 , March 1992 , pp. 189 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © The Mathematical Association 1992

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References

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