1st Edition
Studies on the Transmission of Medieval Mathematical Astronomy
By Raymond Mercier
Copyright 2004
334 Pages
by
Routledge
334 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Studies on the Transmission of Medieval Mathematical Astronomy opens with a new survey of the transmission of Hellenistic astronomy, followed by two studies on how the notion of precession was treated by Babylonian, Greek, Indian, Arabic and Latin hands. Next is a survey of the astronomical tables that appeared in Latin during the 12th century, drawn mainly from Arabic and to some extent from... Read more
Contents: Introduction: the transmission of the Hellenistic legacy of astronomy; Studies in the medieval conception of precession; Accession and recession: reconstruction of the parameters; From Tantra to Zij; The meridians of reference of Indian astronomical canons; The parameters of the Zij of Ibn al-A'lam; Astronomical tables in the 12th century; The lost Zij of al-Sufi in the 12th-century tables for London and Pisa; The Greek 'Persian Syntaxis' and the Zij-i Ilkhani; The Astronomical Tables of George Gemistus Plethon; The date of the Mahasiddhanta; Index.
Biography
Raymond Mercier
'No one making a serious study of ways in which the technicalities of ancient astronomy were transmitted to posterity can be unaware of those papers on the subject published by Raymond Mercier over the last thirty years. These are not all easily obtained, and we are fortunate to have the best of them bound together in a coherent single volume of the Variorum Collected Studies Series... considered now a a group, they sweep majestically across a vast landscape, taking in Babylonian, Greek, Indian, Arabic and Latin cultures.' Journal for the History of Astronomy
