Joseph Ibn Waqār and the treatment of retrograde motion in the middle ages (Q2692773)

The topic of this paper is the astronomical work of a medieval astronomer concerned with planetary retrogradation, Joseph b.\ Isaac b.\ Moses Ibn Waqār, from Córdoba, active during the fourteenth century. A member of a prominent Jewish family of scholars and physicians, he is the author of a set of astronomical tables in Arabic written in Hebrew characters, composed in 1359--60 AD. This study focuses on a set of almanacs for retrograde motion, one for each of the five planets, where the argument is the number of days after second station. The analysis is restricted to the case of Mercury, the only planet for which the almanac is complete. The discovery of these almanacs is considered ``to be of particular significance,'' given that ``it is most surprising to find a new type of medieval astronomical table, given that a great many sets of astronomical tables in Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin have already been described in the secondary literature.[\(\ldots\)] Unfortunately, Ibn Waqār did not include any instructions for using these almanacs or information on how they were computed.''