Talk:Al-Mahani

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.	Biography Portal
Stub	This article has been rated as Stub-Class on the project's quality scale. [FAQ]
	This article is supported by the Science and academia work group.

This article has been automatically assessed as Stub-Class by WikiProject Biography because it uses a stub template. If you agree with the assessment, please remove {{WPBiography}}'s auto=yes parameter from this talk page. If you disagree with the assessment, please change it by editing the class parameter of the {{WPBiography}} template, removing {{WPBiography}}'s auto=yes parameter from this talk page, and removing the stub template from the article.

	Middle Ages Portal Al-Mahani is part of WikiProject Middle Ages, a project for the community of Wikipedians who are interested in the Middle Ages. For more information, see the project page and the newest articles.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.
Article Grading: The article has not been rated for quality and/or importance yet. Please rate the article and then leave comments here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.
WikiProject Middle Ages To do:

[edit] Copyright Violation

I have removed two paragraphs from this article because they were plagiarized from the MacTutor web site. Here is the offending material.

Wiki: The book Al-fihrist ("Index") by the bookseller Ibn al-Nadim in 988 mentions Mahani, not for his work in astronomy, but rather for his work in geometry and arithmetic. However the work which Mahani did in mathematics may well have been motivated by various problems of an astronomical nature.

MacTutor:

The Fihrist (Index) was a work compiled by the bookseller Ibn an-Nadim in 988. It gives a full account of the Arabic literature which was available in the 10th century and in particular mentions al-Mahani, not for his work in astronomy, but rather for his work in geometry and arithmetic. However the work which al-Mahani did in mathematics may well have been motivated by various problems of an astronomical nature.

Wiki: Omar Khayyam is quite correct to rate Mahani's work highly, despite his failure in the mentioned problem. The fact that Mahani conceived the idea of reducing problems such as duplicating the cube to problems in algebra was an important step forward by itself.

MacTutor:

Omar Khayyam is quite correct to rate this work highly. It would be too easy to say that since al-Mahani has proposed a method of solution which he could not carry through then his work was of little value. However, this, as Omar Khayyam is well aware, is not so at all and the fact that al-Mahani conceived the idea of reducing problems such as duplicating the cube to problems in algebra was an important step forward.

DavidCBryant 13:01, 15 April 2007 (UTC)