scientific article; zbMATH DE number 2154446

History of Greek and Roman mathematics (01A20) History of mathematics in the Golden Age of Islam (01A30) Elementary problems in Euclidean geometries (51M04) Geometric constructions in real or complex geometry (51M15)

Review text

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].

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