No label defined (Q4664969)

This paper is an extensive overview of \textit{al-Sijzī}'s work entitled [``Book on the Selected Problems that Were Discussed by Him and the Geometers of Shīrāz and Korāsān, and his (i.e., al-Sijzī's) Annotations''] and referred to for brevity as [``Geometrical Annotations''] or simply as [GA]. The pronoun ``Him'' in the title refers to \textit{Abū Sahl al-Kūhī} who was arguably the best geometer in the tenth-century Islamic era and who presumably was al-Sijzī's teacher. Al-Sijzī's aforementioned work [GA] consists of 45 problems that are either posed by al-Kūhī and others and solved by al-Kūhī or posed by al-Kūhī and solved by al-Sijzī and others. The fact that not much of what al-Sijzī attributes to al-Kūhī is found in the 33 extant works of al-Kūhī shows how incomplete these works are. These extant works of al-Kūhī are surveyed by \textit{J. L. Berggren} in [The Enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives, J. P. Hogendijk, A. I. Sabra (eds.), Cambridge, 177--196 (2003; Zbl 1067.01521)], and one of the aims of the paper under review is to uncover lost contributions of al-Kūhī by looking for references to him in the writings of others. The paper under review is a valuable addition to the authors' earlier works. It contains (i) much of the original Arabic text of al-Sijzī's [GA] together with a lot of corrections, mainly grammatical, made by the authors, (ii) a translation into English with illustrating figures, (iii) a comparison among various manuscripts that contain different versions of al-Sijzī's [GA] and relations to other works by al-Sijzī and others, and (iv) a detailed overview of the 45 problems that constitute [GA]. Since some of these problems are special cases of problems that were known to Apollonius, the authors conclude that these problems were probably given by al-Kūhī as instructional material aimed at developing al-Sijzī skills in geometry. They also point to the practical significance of some of these problems and to al-Sijzī's having been more concerned with these practical aspects than with rigor. The reviewer would like to add that some of the contents of [GA] can be used in today's geometry classes, competitions, and research. As an example, the problem of inscribing the largest square in a given triangle is nothing but the problem solved by \textit{H. Bailey} and \textit{D. Detemple} in [Math. Mag. 71, 278--284 (1998)] and in Problem 18 of Part I of \textit{G. Pólya}'s book [How to solve it (Princeton University Press, N. J.) (1945; Zbl 0061.00616), (2004; Zbl 1108.00008)] and generalized by \textit{M. J. Pelling} in [Problem E3114, Am. Math. Mon. 95, 55--56 (1988)] and by \textit{K. Witczyński} in [J. Geom. 81, 192--198 (2004; Zbl 1069.51013)]. For the entire collection see [Zbl 1055.01002].