The Arabic Version of Euclid's Optics: Edited and Translated with Historical Introduction and Commentary Volume I / Edition 1

by Elaheh Kheirandish

Overview

Like all classical Greek texts on science, Euclid's works on optics initially came to the West mainly through medieval Arabic texts and commentaries. While several Greek versions of the Optika were discovered and translated as early as the sixteenth century, sorting out what may have been Euclid's original has not been easy. This book presents a critical translation of an Arabic texts and of Arabic commentaries on the text, and places the whole in a historical context. The Optics is particularly interesting in that Euclid's text was considerably transformed in the process of translation into Arabic "equivalents"; in addition, several of the Arabic editions of Euclid's text (c. 300 BC) contained liberal admixtures of a much later book by Ptolemy (c. 200 AD) of the same title. What was referred to as "Euclid's Optics," the "Kitab Uqlidis fi Ikhtilaf al-manazir," thus became as much an exposition of an Arabic version of a visual theory as a translation of Euclid's ideas on the subject. In preparing this edition, Dr. Kheirandish has thus not only sorted out the various manuscript versions of Al-Manazir, but also related and unrelated texts that were often confused with it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780387985237
Publisher:	Springer New York
Publication date:	12/21/1998
Series:	Sources in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences , #16
Edition description:	1999
Pages:	247
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.03(d)

Table of Contents

1 The Arabic Versions.- 2 Description and Analysis of Manuscripts.- 3 Editorial Procedures and Apparatus.- 4 List of Manuscripts.- 5 The Arabic Tradition.- 6 Textual Transmission.- 7 Kitāb Uglīdis fī Ikhtilāf al-manāẓir.- 8 Islah al-Manāẓir.- Appendices.- Appendix A Manuscript Plates.- Appendix B Supplementary Passages.