“He moved to Egypt and supported himself by teaching and by copying Arabic translations of Greek mathematical classics such as Euclid’s Elements and Ptolemy’s Almagest.”

—  Alhazen

Abdelhamid I. Sabra, in “Ibn al-Haytham Brief life of an Arab mathematician: died circa 1040 (September-October 2003)”

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "He moved to Egypt and supported himself by teaching and by copying Arabic translations of Greek mathematical classics s…" by Alhazen?
Alhazen photo
Alhazen5
Arab physicist, mathematician and astronomer 965–1038

Related quotes

“Not much younger than these (sc. Hermotimus of Colophon and Philippus of Mende) is Euclid, who put together the Elements, collecting many of Eudoxus' theorems, perfecting many of Theaetetus', and also bringing to irrefragable demonstration the things which were only somewhat loosely proved by his predecessors. This man lived in the time of the first Ptolemy. For Archimedes, who came immediately after the first (Ptolemy), makes mention of Euclid: and, further, they say that Ptolemy once asked him if there was in geometry any shorter way than that of the elements, and he answered that there was no royal road to geometry. He is then younger than pupils of Plato but older than Eratosthenes and Archimedes; for the latter were contemporary with one another, as Eratosthenes somewhere says.”

Proclus (412–485) Greek philosopher

As quoted by Sir Thomas Little Heath, The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements (1908) Vol.1 https://books.google.com/books?id=UhgPAAAAIAAJ Introduction and Books I, II p.1, citing Proclus ed. Friedlein, p. 68, 6-20.

“The history of Alexandrian mathematics begins with the Elements of Euclid and closes with the Algebra of Diophantus, both of which are founded on the discoveries of several preceding centuries.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

Preface
A Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884)

Florian Cajori photo

“It is a remarkable fact in the history of geometry, that the Elements of Euclid, written two thousand years ago, are still regarded by many as the best introduction to the mathematical sciences.”

Florian Cajori book A History of Mathematics

Source: A History of Mathematics (1893), p. 30 Reported in Memorabilia mathematica or, The philomath's quotation-book by Robert Edouard Moritz. Published 1914.

David Eugene Smith photo

“Wallis was in sympathy with Greek mathematics and astronomy, editing parts of the works of Archimedes, Eutocius, Ptolemy, and Aristarchus; but at the same time he recognized the fact that the analytic method was to replace the synthetic, as when he defined a conic as a curve of the second degree instead of as a section of a cone, and treated it by the aid of coordinates.”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

History of Mathematics (1923) Vol.1

Thomas Little Heath photo

“It is… the author's confident hope that this book will give a fresh interest to the story of Greek mathematics in the eyes both of mathematicians and of classical scholars.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Preface p. v
A History of Greek Mathematics (1921) Vol. 1. From Thales to Euclid

“are the familiar translations and rotations… made in proving the theorems of Euclid.”

Howard P. Robertson (1903–1961) American mathematician and physicist

Geometry as a Branch of Physics (1949)

Cassius Jackson Keyser photo

“The golden age of mathematics - that was not the age of Euclid, it is ours.”

Cassius Jackson Keyser (1862–1947) American mathematician and journalist of pronounced philosophical inclinations

Source: The Human Worth of Rigorous Thinking: Essays and Addresses, p. 268

“We can never stress enough that the Latin Alchemy of the Latin West owes nothing to the Greeks, to the Arabs it owes more or less everything. For decades we have persisted in studying fragments from the alchemists as if the contents and essence of Latin alchemy could be explained by it… It was not the Greek alchemists but the translations from original Arabic works which paved the way to Western development.”

Julius Ruska (1867–1949) German historian

in Robert Halleux, ‘The Reception of Arabic Alchemy in the West', in Encyclopaedia of the History of Arabic Science, vol. 3, pp. 896-7

Robert M. Pirsig photo

“He strives after that which we translate 'virtue' but is in Greek aretê, 'excellence' …”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Context: "What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism," Kitto comments, "is not a sense of duty as we understand it—duty towards others: it is rather duty towards himself. He strives after that which we translate 'virtue' but is in Greek aretê, 'excellence' … we shall have much to say about aretê. It runs through Greek life."
There, Phædrus thinks, is a definition of Quality that had existed a thousand years before the dialecticians ever thought to put it to word-traps. Anyone who cannot understand this meaning without logical definiens and definendum and differentia is either lying or so out of touch with the common lot of humanity as to be unworthy of receiving any reply whatsoever.

Charles William Eliot photo

“A university teaches. What does it teach? It must obviously teach all the languages in which the great literatures which have been preserved were written — Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Scandinavian, and English.”

Charles William Eliot (1834–1926) President of Harvard

[Z. Elmarsafy, A. Bernard, D. Attwell, Debating Orientalism, https://books.google.com/books?id=VP6ARP2m-D0C&pg=PA82, 13 June 2013, Springer, 978-1-137-34111-2, 82]

Related topics