Edward Stewart Kennedy

Edward Stewart Kennedy (born January 3, 1912 in Mexico - † May 4, 2009 in Doylestown , Pennsylvania ) was an American historian of science who studied astronomy in medieval Islam .

Life

He was born to American parents in Mexico, but the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution sent his parents back to the United States, where he grew up in Easton, Pennsylvania . In 1932 he made his college degree in Easton and went as a teacher at a school run by the Presbyterians near Tehran (Alborz College). He stayed there for four years and his stay sparked his interest in the Islamic world. After returning he studied at Lehigh University , where he received his doctorate in mathematics at Tomlinson Fort in 1939 (Exponential analogs of the Lambert series). He then was an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama and began studying medieval Persian and Arabic astronomy and mathematics.

During the Second World War, from 1941 onwards, he was one of the few Farsi- speaking officers in the Allied mission in Iran . After a brief return to the USA during this time, his collaboration with Otto Neugebauer began at Brown University , which lasted until his death in 1990. In 1946 he became a professor at the American University of Beirut , where he deepened his knowledge of Arabic. In 1951 he married the teacher Mary Helen Scanlon there. In 1976 he retired in Beirut. He continued his research from 1976 to 1978 at the American Research Center in Egypt and from 1978 to 1980 at the Institute for the History of Arab Science in Aleppo . Retirement plans in Lebanon, where he had a summer home in the mountains above Beirut, were shattered by the civil war and he finally left Lebanon in 1984. He spent four years at the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt , headed by Fuat Sezgin , and from 1989 at Princeton University .

His specialty were the astronomical handbooks of medieval Islam called Zij (both by the Arabs and the Persians) . His main work on it appeared in 1956.

In 2001 he received the Jordanian Istiqlal Order .

Fonts

• A survey of Islamic Astronomical Tables, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Volume 46, Part 2, 1956, pp. 121-177
• with others: Studies in Islamic Exact Sciences, American University of Beirut Press 1983

literature

• Benno van Dalen : In Memoriam ES Kennedy (1912-2009), Historia Mathematica, Volume 37, 2010, pp. 159-163.

Web links

• obituary

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Edward Stewart Kennedy in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)