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Young World
WORLD OF SCIENCE
Jamshid al-Kashi
DR. T. V. PADMA
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He revised a set of astronomical tables, and came up with an approximation of pi to 16 decimal places.
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The establishment of the beginning and end of the period of Ramzan gave rise to a surge of interest by Muslim astronomers and mathematicians in astronomical phenomena. Al-Kashi, a Persian mathematician who lived in the later half of the 14th century, was very interested in observational astronomy. He joined an established group of scientists at Samarkand, where an observatory and a madrassa where science and theolog
y were studied, had been established.
Horner’s method
In 1414, he revised a set of astronomical tables that had been created by the illustrious Arab mathematician Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and dedicated this work to another prominent Arab astronomer, Ulugh Beg. Al-Kashi was capable of prodigious calculations and came up with an approximation of pi to 16 decimal places.
In the Calculator’s Key or Miftah al-Hisab, which he authored, he provided, among other things, a method of extracting the nth root of a number which may have been derived from an originally Chinese system, and which is similar to the now so-called Horner’s method.
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