×

Science in translation. Movements of knowledge through cultures and time. (English) Zbl 0954.01024

Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. xii, 325 p. (2000).
The author makes the obvious point that the rule of Hellenistic thought over European science lasted only from the 12th century to the Renaissance since anything transmitted through Roman channels was simplified in the extreme. The transmission of science went from Greek to Syriac to Arabic to Latin, where in particular the Arabic writing authors added immensely to the corpus of knowledge. In a second part, the author studies the penetration of Western Science into Japan. It is quite clear that the book is based on secondary sources; so Greek \(\varsigma\) is regularly misspelled as \(\zeta\) and most Arabic words are wrongly transcribed (the Moslem holy book is qur’ān, not qu’rān; “degree” is darajä, not dara’a, etc.).
Reviewer: H.Guggenheimer

MSC:

01A99 History of mathematics and mathematicians
PDFBibTeX XMLCite