The Center for Arab Unity Studies has published the book Arabs’ Contribution to the Evolution of Scientific Knowledge: Rushdi Rashid’s Work in Mathematics as a Reference by researcher Muhammed Hady Abderrahim.
With the progress of philosophical and scientific studies on the history of science, the role of the Arabs in establishing and producing basic sciences is becoming more and more evident, most notably mathematics – or at least some branches of this science – which arose in a societal, cultural and scientific environment provided by the Islamic state in the Middle Ages. This state represented a circle of polarization for philosophers and scientists from the various civilizations of the East that Islam reached.
The author begins his book with an extensive presentation on the concept of “the history of mathematics” and the reasons for interest in it, and how the research of some historians in this field led to acknowledging the role of scholars of Arab-Islamic civilization in developing and enriching some branches of mathematics. Then the book deals with the most important contributions of the Arab-Islamic civilization in this science, such as “combinable arithmetic” and “algebra” as two examples of what the mathematicians of Islamic civilization invented, in addition to “numerical triangles” and “mathematics of the infinitesimal” as additions to this science at the level of content and methodology. The author of the book relied on refereed references in his research, such as what was published by the Center for Arab Unity Studies of the works of Rushdi Rashid.
In this book, the reader touches on the richness of the contribution of previous civilizations in the human scientific heritage, and the importance of discovery of the missing links for a correct understanding of the various developments.
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