1950 - present
With few exceptions I restrict the entries to works written 1950 or
later. Again, I am excluding many, many important books and articles
this way. Fortunately Fuat Sezgin has published reprints of the most
important works written before 1960 in the series Islamic Mathematics
and Astronomy. So far the series has reached 108 volumes.
A list of these books can be found at the website for the Institut für
Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften:
http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/fb13/igaiw/publication/mathematic.html
Introductory works
To aid the newcomer to the field of Islamic math, I have included Introductory
subcategories. I hope to add many more references to GOOD works accessible
to the non-specialist. If you can think of ways to make the bibliography
more friendly for such people, let me know what they are!
Glossaries
Several books and articles contain glossaries of technical terms in
Arabic. To find them, do a text search for "Glossary".
My method for writing the bibliography
-----For books:
(1) I took the twenty
or so most prolific authors (David A. King, E. S. Kennedy, etc.), and I
searched for their books using the online card catalogues of Indiana University,
Harvard University, and Yale University. I then either looked over
each book at IU, or I obtained a copy through interlibrary loan;
(2) I read the book
reviews published in many journals over the past half century. I
entered some of these based solely on reviews, other books I read over
in person.
-----For articles:
I have at least looked over nearly every article in the bibliography.
These I found them two ways:
(1) I read through
every volume published 1950 and later of the following journals:
Arabic Sciences and Philosophy
Archive for History of Exact Sciences
Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences
Centaurus
Historia Mathematica
Historia Scientiarum
History of Science
Isis
Journal for the History of Arabic Science
Journal for the History of Astronomy
Journal of Near Eastern Studies
Journal of the American Oriental Society
M.I.D.E.O. (Mélanges - Institut Dominicain d'Études Orientales
du Caire)
Osiris
Physis
Revue d'Histoire des Sciences
Revue de Synthèse
SCIAMVS
Scientiarum Historia
Scripta Mathematica
Suhayl
Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften
(I have no access to Sudhoffs Archiv Zeitschrift für Wissenschaftsgeschichte
or Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft Wiesbaden.)
(2) I followed through references in the
bibliographies of many articles and books, including the Isis Current Bibliographies.
A few articles I included based on reivews in Mathematical
Reviews.
On Categories
Most works are referred to once. Some, however, fall into two
or three categories. Example: Sonja Brentjes' article "Sur
quelques travaux mathématiques d'Ibn Fallûs." (Archives
Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences 40 (1990), 239-257)
can be found under "Arithmetic", "Algebra", and "Geometry", since it deals
with each of those topics.
The "Transmission" categories, such as "Transmission--To India & China" include not only works dealing with the history of the transmission of texts, but also original works written in direct response to problems posed in a previous civilization. So an article dealing with Khayyâm's treatment of proportional magnitudes appears in the "Transmission---Greek Geometry---Euclid's Elements" category as well as the "Geometry" category. The latter category contains only works dealing with original Islamic contributions to geometry, including commentaries.
Anyone interested in planetary theories will want to consult works dealing with astronomical tables (zîjes). For this reason it would be superfluous to list works dealing primarily with tables in the "Astronomy--planets" category as well as the "Astronomical tables" category. Likewise, there is a lot of trigonometry to be found in books and articles dealing with astronomy, but only those which treat trigonometry explicitly will be found in the "Trigonometry" section.
Medieval works on some topics within the realm of the mathematical sciences, like astrology and fixed stars, often have little mathematical content. I have been less thorough in my coverage of these areas.
Diacritical marks
I tried to reproduce diacritical marks as best I could, but I have
no way of producing a dot under a letter, or some occasional rarer marks.
For the macron (bar over a letter) I have substituted the .html "hat" (as
in "â"). To see the correct version of a book title, article
title, or author, refer to the original work.
Improvement
There are weak points to the bibliography, such as the lack of attention
I have paid to the works of medieval Hebrew writers, and the lack of categories
dedicated to the mathematics of al-Andalus and the transmissoin of knowledge
between the eastern and western Islamic lands.
I thank Jan Hogendijk, Len Berggren, and David A. King for their suggestions. Dimitri Gutas helped as well. All the errors which remain are mine---and I'm sure there are quite a few! Please send corrections and suggestions to me, Jeff Oaks, at oaks@uindy.edu.