Abu'l-Wafa

Mohammad Abu'l-Wafa al'Buzjani

Born: 10 June 940 in Buzjan (now in Iran)
Died: 15 July 998 in Baghdad (now in Iraq)

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Abu'l-Wafa translated and wrote commentaries, since lost, on the works of Euclid, Diophantus and al'Khwarizmi. He is best known for the first use of the tan function and compiling tables of sines and tangents at 15' intervals. This work was done as part of an investigation into the orbit of the Moon.

His trigonometric tables are accurate to 8 decimal places (converted to decimal notation) while Ptolemy's were only accurate to 3 places.

References elsewhere in this archive:

Tell me about Abu'l-Wafa's contribution to trigonometry

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. M I Medovoy, On the arithmetic treatise of Abu'l-Wafa, Studies in the history of mathematics 13 (1960), 253-324.
  4. R C Gupta, Abu'l Wafa and his Indian Rule about regular polygons, Ganita-Bharati. Bulletin of the Indian Society for the History of Mathematics 14 (1992), 57-61. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996