Homework reading: An introduction to the mathematics of the Golden Age of medieval Islam

Reading through the first chapter of the book, the first thing that struck me is the importance of Islamic mathematicians' contributions to mathematical history.  They were integral in integrating ancient Greek and Hindu mathematics treaties and then adding their own contributions to create perhaps the first complete collection of mathematical knowledge in the world.  This integration, compilation, and advancement of mathematical knowledge probably laid the foundation for future mathematics advancements in Europe during the Renaissance Age. 

The second thing that struck me is the difficulty in finding knowledge during that time.  We are used to searching for knowledge with a simple Google search nowadays, and even before the Internet, libraries and encyclopedia were still allowed to easily access knowledge.  However, during the Golden Age of Islam, the search for knowledge is much harder than I had imagined.  As an example of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq search for a Greek manuscript illustrates, he and a colleague had to search almost all the major centers in the Middle East to try to find a copy of a Greek manuscript, and they were only able to find parts of the book and those parts were out of order.  And then there were the issues of translating the works, made more difficult when there were terms and values of measurements like the Greek unit of "stades" that were not known. Hence, the compilation of the known mathematical knowledge is much harder than we can imagine.

The third thing that surprised me is the amount of work that went into some of the discoveries.  For example, al-Kāshī’s calculation of pi's value to 16 decimal places used a circumscribed polygon of 805,306,368 sides! To perform such calculations before the invention of computers is simply unbelievable to these mathematicians' great minds.

There are many other interesting and fascinating knowledge of Islamic mathematic history in the reading.  The 4 great Islamic mathematicians' biography is a fascinating read and certainly a very much neglected part of mathematic history.