Ishāq ibn Hunain

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Ishāq ibn Hunain or Abū Yaʿqūb Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn (* around 830; † 910 ) was an Arabic translator and mathematician of the 9th and 10th centuries in Baghdad .

He was a Christian and the son of the great translator from Greek into Arabic and doctor Hunain ibn Ishāq , who worked in the House of Wisdom (Baghdad) . Ishaq ibn Hunayn supported him in his translations and is considered the second translator of the elements from Euclid into Arabic after al-Hajjjij in the 8th and early 9th centuries. The translation was checked and improved by the mathematician Thabit ibn Qurra , but he died in 901. Only the version revised by Thabit ibn Qurra has survived. Two manuscripts are in the Bodleian Library in Oxford: No. 279 from 1238 and No. 280 from 1260/61. They include books 1–13 of the elements (and books 14, 15, which are not from Euclid, in a translation by another author Qusta ibn Luqa (* 820 in Baalbek ; † around 912)). There is also a manuscript in Copenhagen.

From the edition of the elements by Ishaq ibn Hunayn / Thabit ibn Qurra, Moses ibn Tibbon or Jakob ben Machir (died 1306, also from the ibn Tibbon family) made a Hebrew translation of the elements in southern France in the 13th century.

He also translated the Almagest by Claudius Ptolemy , which was also revised by the mathematician and astronomer Thabit ibn Qurra. The translation became the most widely used Arabic version of the Almagest.

The next Arabic edition of the elements comes from Nasir Al-din al-Tusi (1248), but it was based on the older translations and was not a separate translation.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. Friedrun R. Hau: Qusta ibn Luqa al-Ba'labakkī. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 1210.