Alī ibn Ahmad al-Nasawī

transl|ar|ALA|ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad al-Nasawī (c. 1010 possibly in Nasa, Khurasan – c. 1075 in Baghdad) was a Persian mathematician from Khurasan, Iran. He flourished under the Buwayhid sultan Majd al-dowleh, who died in 1029-30AD, and under his successor. He wrote a book on arithmetic in Persian, and then Arabic, entitled the "Satisfying (or Convincing) on Hindu Calculation" ("al-muqni fi-l-hisab al Hindi"). He also wrote on Archimedes's lemmata and Menelaus's theorem ("Kitab al-ishba", or "satiation"). where he made corrections to "The Lemmata" as translated into Arabic by Thabit ibn Qurra, which was last revised by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi.

Al-Nasawī's arithmetic explains the division of fractions and the extraction of square and cubic roots (square root of 57,342; cubic root of 3, 652, 296) almost in the modern manner. It is remarkable that al-Nasawī replaces sexagesimal by decimal fractions.

Ragep and Kennedy also give an analysis of a mid-12th century manuscript in which a summary of Euclid's Elements exists by al-Nasawī.

Further reading

*Suter, H. Die Mathematiker und Astronomen der Araber (96, 1900) Uber das Rechenbuch des Ali ben Ahmed el-Nasawi (Bibliotheca Mathematica, vol. 7, 113-119, 1906).
*J. Ragep and E. S. Kennedy. A description of Zahiriyya (Damascus) MS 4871 : a philosophical and scientific collection, J. Hist. Arabic Sci. 5 (1-2) (1981), 85-108.
*DSB|title=Nasawī, ʿAlī Ibn Aḥmad al-|first=A. S.|last=Saidan
*MacTutor|id=Al-Nasawi|title=Abu l'Hasan Ali ibn Ahmad Al-Nasawi