Abstract
Muslim mathematicians were the first people to write numbers the way we do, and, although we are the heirs of the Greeks in geometry, the part of our legacy from the Muslim world is our arithmetic.
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Notes
- 1.
His other work, also on arithmetic, was titled Al-Kāmil (The Complete/Perfect).
- 2.
Since Arabic is read from right to left, ‘first’ denominator means the rightmost.
- 3.
We have relied on Souissi (1969).
- 4.
Interestingly, however, according to Djebbar (1992) the treatment of doubling and halving as separate topics in Arabic arithmetic was, after al- Ḥ a ṣṣ ār, dropped in the Maghrib and the topics were dealt with as special cases of multiplication and division.
- 5.
At some point in the history of this text, the bracketed phrase I have inserted, clearly essential, was left out.
Bibliography
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Berggren, J.L. (2016). Arithmetic in the Islamic World. In: Episodes in the Mathematics of Medieval Islam. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3780-6_2
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