In the Islamic world of the fifteenth century there was a general halt in research and a lowering of the level of instruction. In mathematics this tendency resulted in a repetitive scientific production made up of poems or commentaries directed at an increasingly narrow public: teachers, muwaqqits (astronomers) charged with determining the hours of daily prayers, judicial functionaries, government bookkeepers, etc.
It is in light of this tendency that we can appreciate both the intellectual journey and the scientific contribution of al‐Qalaṣādī, one of the last scholars of Andalusian origin who dedicated a large part of his life to disseminating – to the central Maghreb, to Ifriqiya, and to Egypt – what he knew of the Arab mathematical tradition of the preceding centuries.
˓Alī ibn Muḥammad al‐Qalaṣādī was born around 1412 in the Andalusian village of Basta. This small village, which is in the northeastern part of Grenada, was already prosperous in the time of the geographer al‐Idrīsī...
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Djebbar, A. (2008). Al‐Qalaṣādī. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_9324
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