Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the flourishing of maths in the early Islamic world, as thinkers from across the region developed ideas in places such as Baghdad's House of Wisdom. Among them were the Persians Omar Khayyam, who worked on equations, and Al-Khwarizmi, latinised as Algoritmi and pictured above, who is credited as one of the fathers of algebra, and the Jewish scholar Al-Samawal, who converted to Islam and worked on mathematical induction. As well as the new ideas, there were many advances drawing on Indian, Babylonian and Greek work and, thanks to the recording or reworking by mathematicians in the Islamic world, that broad range of earlier maths was passed on to western Europe for further study. With Colva Roney-Dougal, Reader in Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews; Peter Pormann, Professor of Classics & Graeco-Arabic Studies at the University of Manchester; and Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey. Producer: Simon Tillotson.
READING LIST:
Jim Al-Khalili, Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science (Penguin, 2012)
Muhammad b. Mūsa al-Khwārizmi (trans. F. Rosen), The Algebra of Muhammad ibn Mūsa (Oriental Translation Fund, 1831)
J. L. Berggren, Episodes in the Mathematics of Medieval Islam (Springer, 2013)
J. N. Crossley, The Emergence of Number (World Scientific, 1987)
Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (Routledge, 1998)
George Gheverghese Joseph, The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics (Princeton University Press, 2010)
Victor J. Katz, A History of Mathematics: An Introduction (Pearson, 1998)
Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (Brown University Press, 1957)
Roshdi Rashed, The Development of Arabic Mathematics: Between Arithmetic and Algebra (Springer, 1994)
Roshdi Rashed, Al Khwarizmi: The Beginnings of Algebra (Saqi Books, 2009)
George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (MIT Press, 2007)
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