It provides proof of the fact that indeed the Renaissance scholars of Europe were indeed copying much of the work without appropriately giving credit for it - and raises the question of why it is that 'Western' writers of the history of science also fail to give such credit - and simply call it all western - from the ancient Greeks straight to renaissance Europe via the preservation of the Arabic scholars.
The reality was that the old knowledge of the Greeks were improved vastly and added to by the Islamic scholars.
ps Arabic and Islamic are not terms used to refer to ethnicity or religion - only that it was presented in the Islamic civilisations and used the Arabic language for scholarship.
Nasruddin Tusi - the Khurasani Scholar is referred to many times.
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George Saliba, senior distinguished visiting scholar in the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, presented a talk on "Islamic Science and The Making of Renaissance Europe."
Saliba's illustrated talk explored the scientific ideas that passed from the Islamic world to the European Renaissance during the 15th and 16th centuries. He showed the connection between mathematical innovations produced in the Islamic world and mathematical astronomy during the Renaissance. Saliba relied on evidence that was culled from copies of original Arabic scientific manuscripts and their Latin counterparts.
Speaker Biography: Librarian of Congress James H. Billington named George Saliba to a 10-month post as a Kluge scholar last July. Saliba is professor of Arabic and Islamic science in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. He received a master's degree in Semitic languages and a doctorate in Islamic sciences from the University of California at Berkeley. Saliba has been a professor at Columbia since 1979.
