EAST AND WEST 153 



mathematical school in Cairo, made famous by the great astron- 

 omer, Ibn Yunus and the great physicist Ibn al-Haitham; al- 

 Karkhi was working in Baghdad, Ibn Sina in Persia, al-Blruni in 

 Afghanistan. These mathematicians and others, like Ibn al-Husain 

 and Abu-1-Jud, were not afraid to tackle the most difficult prob- 

 lems of Greek geometry; they solved cubic equations by the 

 intersection of conies, they investigated the regular heptagon and 

 enneagon, developed spherical trigonometry, Diophantine analy- 

 sis, etc. Pass to the West and what do we find? Wretched little 

 treatises on the calendar, on the use of the abacus, on Roman 

 (duodecimal) fractions, etc. We have a "mathematicar cor- 

 respondence exchanged (c. 1025) by two schoolmasters, Ragim- 

 bold of Cologne and Radolf of Liege. It is truly pitiful. Their 

 geometry was on the pre-Pythagorean level; they were not bad 

 computers, it is true; we might compare them to the Egyptian 

 scribe Ahmose, who had done his task almost twenty-seven 

 centuries before ! 



How is it that the Muslim or oriental supremacy ended about 

 the end of the eleventh century? There was a double cause for 

 this: the Arabic genius was less vigorous and less fertile; the 

 power and knowledge of the Latin world was growing faster and 

 faster. The Arabic achievements did not stop, not by any means. 

 Great Arabic scientists and scholars continued to appear until 

 the fourteenth century and even later. For example, mathe- 

 maticians and astronomers like Jabir ibn Aflah, al-BitrujI, al- 

 Hasan al-Marrakushi, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi; physicists like 

 al-Khazini, Qutb al-Din al-Shlrazi, Kamal al-Din ibn Yunus 

 geographers like Yaqut, al-Qazwini, Abu-1-Fida', Ibn Battuta 

 philosophers like Ibn Rushd, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, f Abd al-Latif 

 physicians like Ibn Zuhr and Ibn al-Baitar; botanists and agri- 

 culturists like Ibn al-Suri and Ibn al-'Awwam; historians like 

 Ibn Khallikan, Rashid al-Din, Ibn Khaldun, al-Maqrlzi, etc., etc. 

 This list might be lengthened considerably and yet contain only 

 very distinguished names; as it is, it includes some of the most 



