Brief History of Al-masaha and the First Separate Turkish Al-masaha Book: Amri Chalabi’s Majma‘ Algharaeb Fi Al-masaha
al-Masaha (science of measuring) is one of the four principal disciplines that are formed as a result of shaping the mathematical accumulation that Islamic Civilization mathematicians inherited from previous civilizations around two basic objects, namely number/al-adad/discontinuous quantity and magnitude/al-miqdar/continuous quantity. While alhisab (arithmetic) and algebra revolve around the number, al-handasa (theoretical geometry) revolves around the magnitude. But al-masaha has a different position in that it concerns both objects. With this characteristic, besides theoretical foundation feeding its own method, it is the main tool of engineering, architecture, urbanism, military technology and various arts with its main principle of “calculating by measuring”. It is certain that the Ottoman Civilization, which took over all the scientific accumulation of Islamic Civilization, also adopted the studies in the field of al-masaha and continued within the framework of its own needs, demands and tendencies. In addition to Arabic, which is the language of science in circulation, mathematics works have emerged in Turkish since the 15th and 16th centuries. According to researches, being the earliest known Turkish book that is written entirely on al-masaha Majma‘ al-Gharaeb fi al-Masaha, is the subject of this article due to this feature. However, in order to provide a background before the introduction of the work, the Ottoman mathematical tradition in general and the al-masaha tradition in particular has been summarized. In this article, historical and mathematical analysis method was used for the presentation of the book. In this article, it is aimed to contribute to the studies of the history of mathematics in the Ottoman civilization by determining al-masaha level of the period in, as well as because of it is the first Turkish book in this field, it will be a source for Turkish language studies .
Elif Baga
