Shams al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad
al-Khalīlī (Arabic: شمس الدين عبد الله
محمد بن محمد الخليلي; 1320–1380) was a
Mamluk-era Syrian astronomer who compiled extensive tables for astronomical
use. He worked for most of his life as a religious timekeeper (muwaqqit) at the
Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Little else is known about his life.
Work
Al-Khalili is known for two sets of mathematical tables
he constructed,
both totaling roughly 30,000 entries. He tabulated all the
entries made by the celebrated Egyptian Muslim astronomer Ibn Yunus, except for
the entries that al-Khalili made himself for the city of Damascus. He computed
13,000 entries into his 'Universal Tables' of different auxiliary functions
which allowed him to generate the solutions of standard problems of spherical
astronomy for any given latitude. In addition to this, he created a 3,000 entry
table that gave the direction of the city of Mecca (the Qibla) for all
latitudes and longitudes for all the Muslim countries of the 14th century. Knowledge
of the direction of the Qibla is essential in Islam because Muslims pray in the
direction of Mecca. The values present in al-Khalili’s tables have been
determined to be accurate up to three or four significant decimal digits. Up to
the present time, it is not known how exactly al-Khalili went about calculating
each of his entries.
Sumber
Labels:
Mathematician
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