Nasir al-Din al-Tusi
Nasir al -Din Tusi (Persian نصیر الدین طوسی, DMG Nasir ud -Din -e Tusi, Arabic أبو جعفر محمد بن محمد بن الحسن نصیرالدین طوسی, DMG Abū ʿ far Muḥammad b Ǧa. Muḥammad b. Ḥasan al - Nasir ad - Din Tusi, * 1201 in Tus, Khorasan Iran near present-day Mashhad, † 1274 in Baghdad ) was a Shiite theologian, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and researcher of Persian origin in the 13th century.
Life
During the invasion of the Mongols in Persia Tusi was in the fortress of Alamut. It is believed that he has betrayed the plan of the fortress on the Mongol Hulagu Khan. Due to this betrayal, the Mongols were able to break the resistance of the Assassins and end the reign of the Ismailis in the mountains of Alborz. Tusi later took the campaign Hülegüs against the Abbasids, and in 1258 participated in the conquest of Baghdad by the Mongols in the last caliph was out of the house of the Abbasids death. He was court astrologer as an important adviser to the Khans in the provisional residence Maragha. Tusi died in 1274 near Baghdad.
He was probably the first person who has viewed the trigonometry as an independent field of mathematics. Is known is his work on the parallel axiom. He also produced an Arabic edition of the Elements of Euclid (in a longer and shorter version ), which was based on earlier Arabic translations from the Greek, which he edited. On this and other Arabic versions based the first translations of the elements into Latin in Western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries, as the ancient Latin text had been lost in the meantime.
He received in 1259 by Hulagu to order, the observatory Rasad -e Khan near the city Maragha to establish in the Persian province Āzarbāydschān. In addition to Iranian and Islamic researchers also Christian, Armenian and Georgian and Chinese mathematicians and astronomers were involved. They determined, for example, the annual precession of the equinoxes to 51 arc-seconds ( current value 50.3 " ) or 1 ° per 70.6 years Since ancient times, it was assumed 1 ° per 100 years old -. The value that Ptolemy in the Almagest used.
At- Tusi is the author of Zij - Ilkhani, the table of the Ilkhanate, which describes the position of the stars and planets according to the results of his research. The work was one of the sources of the later works of Nicolaus Copernicus. For his model of planetary motion at- Tusi had introduced the Tusi - couple, a method to express an oscillating linear motion by the superposition of two circular motions. Copernicus she used eg for the treatment of trepidation, an erroneous oscillation of the equinoxes, which is to Thabit ibn Qurra go back to.
His most important philosophical work Aklaq -i - Nasiri deals with questions of ethics. It remained influential for centuries. As a Shiite theologian, he led the reform of Alamut (See the Ilm al - Kalam ). These Tajrid his book al- ' Aqaid.
The book " debt " by David Graeber, according to at- Tusi similar to Adam Smith who emphasized much less competition and much more cooperation, as opposed to the theory of Adam by market self-regulation effective " hand of God " mentioned, but Smith.