scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1484589
This article gives an edition, a translation with commentary and analysis of a treatise written by the ninth-to-tenth century mathematician al-Fadl Ibn Ḥātim al-Nayrīzī on a subject quite popular in Islamic mathematics, namely, the determination of the direction of prayer from any city on the globe, in this particular case from the city of Baghdad. Needless to say that mathematicians working in that civilization realized early on the spherical/trigonometric nature of the problem, and the difficulty involved in resolving it. Accurate as well as approximate methods were developed for the purpose, and naturally some of them were more successful than others. The current reviewer has many reservations on the results reached in this article, whether regarding the methodology followed in establishing the text, the correct interpretation of it or the assessment, for example, expressed in the ``wonder whether they [meaning the contemporaries of al-Nayrīzī] were able to explain the cause of the error (p. 50). This after admitting correctly (p. 56) that those same contemporaries discussed this work extensively, and some of them were of the caliber of Bīrūnī (d.c. 1048), Abū Naṣr Ibn `Irāq (d.c. 1018), and Battānī (d. 929).
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