Astronomy and Logic pdf

In book V of his Optics, Ibn al-Haytham set outto solve the problem for all cases of spherical. cylin-drical, and conical surfaces, convex and concave.Although he was not successful in every particular,his performance, which showed him to be in fullcommand of the higher mathematics of the Greeks,has rightly won the admiration of later mathe-maticians and historians. Certain diffculties havefaced students of this problem in the work of Ibnal-Haytham. In the Fatih manuscript, and in the AyaSofya manuscript which is copied from it, the textof book V of the Optics suffers from many scribalerrors, and in neither of these manuscripts are thelengthy demonstrations supplied with illustrative di-agrams.37 Such diagrams exist in Kamأ¤l al-Din•scommentary’ and in Risner’s edition of the medievalLatin translation, but neither the diagrams nor thetexts of these two editions are free from mistakes.One cannot, therefore, be too grateful to M. Naziffor his clear and thorough analysis of this problem,to which he devotes four chapters of his masterlybook on Ibn al-Havtham.