Comments on the Bibliography of the Mathematical Sciences in the Medieval Islamic World (By Topic)
Below are comments on the Bibliography of the Mathematical Sciences in the Medieval Islamic World (By Topic).
Languages
I have included only books and articles written in western European languages. This is a reflection of my own limitations as much as it is a way to make the project manageable. Many primary sources in Arabic, Persian, etc. have been edited and published, and there are many very important secondary works in languages such as Russian, Turkish, and Arabic that deserve attention. For a far more thorough bibliography, see Rosenfeld's and Ihsanoglu's 2003 book Mathematicians, Astronomers & Other Scholars of Islamic Civilization and their works (7th - 19th c.). Also, Driss Lamrabet's 2014 Introduction à l'Histoire des Mathématiques Maghrébines (pub. in Morocco) does much the same, with a geographical restriction.
1950 - present
With few exceptions I restrict the entries to works written 1950 or later. Again, I am excluding many, many important books and articles this way. Fortunately Fuat Sezgin has published reprints of the most important works written before 1960 in the series Islamic Mathematics and Astronomy. There are 114 volumes in the series. A list of these books can be found at the website for the Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften.
Introductory works
To aid the newcomer to the field of Islamic mathematics, I have included Introductory subcategories. I hope to add many more references to GOOD works accessible to the non-specialist. If you can think of ways to make the bibliography more friendly for such people, let me know what they are!
Glossaries
Several books and articles contain glossaries of technical terms in Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew. To find them, do a text search for "Glossary".
On Categories
Most works are referred to once. Some, however, fall into two or three categories. Example: Sonja Brentjes' article "Sur quelques travaux mathématiques d'Ibn Fallûs." (Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences 40 (1990), 239-257) can be found under "Arithmetic", "Algebra", and "Geometry", since it deals with each of those topics.
The "Transmission" categories, such as "Transmission--To India & China" include not only works dealing with the history of the transmission of texts, but also original works written in direct response to problems posed in a previous civilization. So an article dealing with Khayyâm's treatment of proportional magnitudes appears in the "Transmission---Greek Geometry---Euclid's Elements" category as well as the "Geometry" category. The latter category contains only works dealing with original Islamic contributions to geometry, including commentaries.
Anyone interested in planetary theories will want to consult works dealing with astronomical tables (zîjes). For this reason it would be superfluous to list works dealing primarily with tables in the "Astronomy--planets" category as well as the "Astronomical tables" category. Likewise, there is a lot of trigonometry to be found in books and articles dealing with astronomy, but only those which treat trigonometry explicitly will be found in the "Trigonometry" section.
Medieval works on some topics within the realm of the mathematical sciences, such as astrology and fixed stars, often have little mathematical content. I have been less thorough in my coverage of these areas.
Diacritical marks
When I compiled this bibliography in 2002 I did not know how to get special characters, like letters with dots under them or bars over them. For the macron (bar over a letter) I substituted the .html "hat" (as in "â"). To see the correct version of a book title, article title, or author, refer to the original work.
Improvement
There are weak points to the bibliography, such as the lack of attention I have paid to the works of medieval Hebrew writers, and the lack of categories dedicated to the mathematics of al-Andalus and the transmissoin of knowledge between the eastern and western Islamic lands.
I thank Jan Hogendijk, Len Berggren, and David A. King for their suggestions. Dimitri Gutas helped as well. All the errors which remain are mine---and I'm sure there are quite a few! Please send corrections and suggestions to me, Jeff Oaks, at oaks@uindy.edu.