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Melvyn Bragg

Colva Roney-Dougal

Peter Pormann

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Simon Tillotson

In Our Time: Maths in the Early Islamic World

Maths in the Early Islamic World

16/02/2017

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Maths in the Early Islamic World

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the flourishing of maths in the Islamic world from C8th.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how mathematicians in the Islamic world, from C8th-C15th, developed new ideas and synthesised ideas from Greek and Indian maths.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the flourishing of maths in the early Islamic world, as thinkers from across the region developed ideas in places such as Baghdad's House of Wisdom. Among them were the Persians Omar Khayyam, who worked on equations, and Al-Khwarizmi, latinised as Algoritmi and pictured above, who is credited as one of the fathers of algebra, and the Jewish scholar Al-Samawal, who converted to Islam and worked on mathematical induction. As well as the new ideas, there were many advances drawing on Indian, Babylonian and Greek work and, thanks to the recording or reworking by mathematicians in the Islamic world, that broad range of earlier maths was passed on to western Europe for further study.

With 

Colva Roney-Dougal
Reader in Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews

Peter Pormann
Professor of Classics & Graeco-Arabic Studies at the University of Manchester

And

Jim Al-Khalili
Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

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