FlourishedBaghdad, (Iraq), circa925
Ādamī is noted for his work on instruments. Ibn al-Ādamī, presumably his son, wrote an influential astronomical handbook with tables (zīj) that was based on Indian sources. The father is mentioned in Ibn al-Nadīm’s Fihrist (dating from the tenth century), where he is called al-Ādamī. Because of the similarity in names, the two have often been confused in modern sources.
According to the Fihrist, Ādamī is the author of a work on sundials, and indeed there is an extant Paris manuscript by him that deals with vertical sundials and contains universal auxiliary tables that are used to simplify calculations. These enabled the drawing of lines for vertical sundials inclined to the local meridian at any desired angle for any latitude. Bīrūnī tells us in his great work on astrolabes (the Istīҁāb) that Ādamī was the first person to construct a “disc of eclipses” for demonstrating solar and lunar eclipses.
The son, Ibn al-Ādamī , was famous for a zīj entitled Na...
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Bolt, M., Ragep, F.J. (2014). Ādamī: Abū ҁAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn Muḥammad al-Ādamī. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_15
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