Ibn al-Haytham's Theory of Conics, Geometrical Constructions and Practical Geometry

Theory of Conics, Geometrical Constructions and Practical Geometry: A History of Arabic Sciences and Mathematics Volume 3, provides a unique primary source on the history and philosophy of mathematics and science from the mediaeval Arab world. The present text is complemented by two preceding volumes of A History of Arabic Sciences and Mathematics, which focused on founding figures and commentators in the ninth and tenth centuries, and the historical and epistemological development of `infinitesimal mathematics¿ as it became clearly articulated in the oeuvre of Ibn al-Haytham. This volume examines the increasing tendency, after the ninth century, to explain mathematical problems inherited from Greek times using the theory of conics. Roshdi Rashed argues that Ibn al-Haytham completes the transformation of this `area of activity,¿ into a part of geometry concerned with geometrical constructions, dealing not only with the metrical properties of conic sections but with ways of drawing them and properties of their position and shape.