al'Kashi

Ghiyath al'Din Jamshid Mas'ud al'Kashi

Born: 1390 in Kashan, Iran
Died: 1450 in Samarkand (now Uzbek)

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Al'Kashi calculated pi to 16 decimal places and considered himself the inventor of decimal fractions. He also worked on solutions of systems of equations. He wrote The Reckoners' Key which summarizes arithmetic and contains work on algebra and geometry.

In another work al'Kashi applied the method now known as fixed-point iteration to solve a cubic equation having sin 1degrees as a root.

References elsewhere in this archive:

Tell me about approximations to pi

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. V V Bartold, Ulug Beg und seine Zeit, Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 21 (1935).
  3. Y Dold-Samplonius, The 15th century Timurid mathematician Ghiyath al-Din Jamshid al-Kashi and his computation of the Qubba, in S S Demidov et al. (eds), Amphora : Festschrift for Hans Wussing on the occasion of his 65th birthday (Basel- Boston- Berlin, 1992), 171-181. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996