Born Sulṭāniyya, (Iran), 22 March 1394
Died near Samarqand, (Uzbekistan), 27 October 1449
Ulugh Beg (Turkish for “great prince”) was governor of Transoxiana and Turkestan and, during the last 2 years of his life, Timurid Sultan. However, he is mostly remembered as a patron of mathematics and astronomy. In Samarqand, he founded a school and the famous astronomical observatory, where the most extensive observations of planets and fixed stars at any Islamic observatory were made. Ulugh Beg is associated with a Persian astronomical handbook (zīj) that stands out for the accuracy with which its tables were computed.
Ulugh Beg was the first‐born son of Shāhrukh (youngest son of the infamous conqueror Tīmūr or Tamerlane) and his first wife Gawharshād. He was raised at the court of his grandfather and, at the age of 10, was married to his cousin Agha Bīkī, whose mother was a direct descendent of Chingiz Khan. Thus Ulugh Beg could use the epithet Gūrgān, “royal son‐in‐law,” which had...
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Selected References
Bagheri, Mohammad (1997). “A Newly Found Letter of Al‐Kāshī on Scientific Life in Samarkand.” Historia Mathematica 24: 241–256.
Barthold, V. V. (1958). Four Studies on the History of Central Asia. Vol. 2, Ulugh‐Beg. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
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——— (1998). “Ulugh Beg as Scientist.” Chapter 10 in Astronomy and Astrology in the Medieval Islamic World. Aldershot: Ashgate. (Describes the marginal note by Ulugh Beg in a manuscript of Kāshī's Zīj.)
Knobel, Edward Ball (1917). Ulugh Beg's Catalogue of Stars: Revised from All Persian Manuscripts Existing in Great Britain, with a Vocabulary of Persian and Arabic Words. Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington.
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——— (1993). “A More Complete Analysis of the Errors in Ulugh Beg's Star Catalogue.” Journal for the History of Astronomy 24: 269–280.
Kunitzsch, Paul (1998). “The Astronomer al‐Sūfī as a Source for Uluġ Beg's Star Catalogue.” In La science dans le monde iranien ā l'époque islamique, edited by Ž. Vesel, H. Beikbaghban, and B. Thierry de Crussol des Epesse, pp. 41–47. Tehran: Institut français de recherche en Iran.
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———(1960). Ghiyâth al‐Dîn al Kâshî's Letter on Ulugh Beg and the Scientific Activity in Samarqand. Ankara: Turkish Historical Society.
Schoy, Carl (1927). Die trigonometrischen Lehren des persischen Astronomen Abū ‘l‐Rayhān Muhammed ibn Ahmed al‐Bīrūnī dargestellt nach al‐Qānūn al‐Mas ҁ ūdī. Hanover: Lafaire. (Reprinted in Schoy, Beiträge zur arabisch‐islamischen Mathematik und Astronomie, edited by Fuat Sezgin, Vol. 2, pp. 629–746. Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic‐Islamic Science, 1988.) (Includes an edition of parts of Ulugh Beg's sine and tangent tables.)
Sédillot, Louis P. E. Amélie (1847). Prolégomènes des tables astronomiques d'Oloug‐Beg. Publiés avec notes et variantes et précédés d'une introduction. Paris: Firmin Didot.
——— (1853). Prolégomènes des tables astronomiques d'Oloug‐Beg. Traduction et commentaire. Paris: Firmin Didot.
Shevchenko, Mikhail Yu (1990). “An Analysis of Errors in the Star Catalogues of Ptolemy and Ulugh Beg.” Journal for the History of Astronomy 21: 187–201.
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Dalen, B.v. (2007). Ulugh Beg: Muḥammad Ṭaraghāy ibn Shāhrukh ibn Tīmūr. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_1401
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