Machine summary:
HUS it is fully recognised now that Science in its modern sense owes its origin to the Islamic spirit of enquiry, and that the scientific method is one of the most fruitful contributions of Muslim Culture.
But, if as late as the sixteenth century, the famous Kepler could only explain the planetary motions by ascribing a soul to every planet, it is a great credit to the Arabs to have conceived of the Universal gravitation before the twelfth century.
In Arithmetic, the Arabs contributed a great deal to the fractions ; to the principle of error which is employed to solve algebraic problems arithmetically ; to the higher theory of numbers with its problems on the primitive, perfect and associated numbers.
Then came ' Umar Khayyam, the most glamorous figure of the eleventh century, who has recently become famous and popular as a great poet, but who, according to Moritz Cantor, has better claim to_ immortality as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.
e. , the end of the eleventh century, the Arabs had founded, developed and perfected geometrical algebra, and could solve equations of the third and fourth degrees.
The Arabs began with translating the geometry of Euclid and the conic sections of Apollonius, and thus preserved the works of these Greek Masters for the modern world.
" Even in the beginning of the Muslim Era, when Greek astronomy was not yet translated into Arabic, a knowledge of the heavens was considered to be one of the.