Talk:Al-Mahani

A fact from Al-Mahani appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 4 July 2018 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the ninth-century astronomer Al-Mahani claimed his estimates of the start times of three consecutive lunar eclipses were accurate to within half an hour?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2018/July. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Al-Mahani.

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I have removed two paragraphs from this article because they were plagiarized from the MacTutor web site. Here is the offending material.

Wiki: The book Al-fihrist ("Index") by the bookseller Ibn al-Nadim in 988 mentions Mahani, not for his work in astronomy, but rather for his work in geometry and arithmetic. However the work which Mahani did in mathematics may well have been motivated by various problems of an astronomical nature.

MacTutor:

The Fihrist (Index) was a work compiled by the bookseller Ibn an-Nadim in 988. It gives a full account of the Arabic literature which was available in the 10th century and in particular mentions al-Mahani, not for his work in astronomy, but rather for his work in geometry and arithmetic. However the work which al-Mahani did in mathematics may well have been motivated by various problems of an astronomical nature.

Wiki: Omar Khayyam is quite correct to rate Mahani's work highly, despite his failure in the mentioned problem. The fact that Mahani conceived the idea of reducing problems such as duplicating the cube to problems in algebra was an important step forward by itself.

MacTutor:

Omar Khayyam is quite correct to rate this work highly. It would be too easy to say that since al-Mahani has proposed a method of solution which he could not carry through then his work was of little value. However, this, as Omar Khayyam is well aware, is not so at all and the fact that al-Mahani conceived the idea of reducing problems such as duplicating the cube to problems in algebra was an important step forward.

DavidCBryant 13:01, 15 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]