Wednesday, May 4, 2011

The Astronemer & Mathematics

Astonemy was huge for the Muslims, they made it big.  Muslims had many uses for astronemy, like compasses and astrolobes were used to locate direction, mostly of Makkah.  These helped those who were praying to pray in the correct direction.  Ramadan figured exact times for prayer.  Eventually, they realized that the Earth rotated.  many also questioned the fact that the Earth was the center of the universe.  Soon they found the Earth travels around the sun.




The Muslims also enhanced mathematics.  Basing things off of ideas from India and Greece.  One scholar, Al-Khwarizmi, was a mathematician and astronemer was best known as "the father of algebra".  The word algebra comes from the title of one of his books.  Alegbra was used to solve problems with unknown numbers.  Al's book on algebra was translated into Latin in the 12th century, being the most important mathematic text in the European universities.Muslims learned fractions, decimals from Indian scholars.  To this day we still use Arabic numerals.

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