Editing Islamic manuscripts on science. Proceedings of the 4th conference of Al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation, London, UK, November 29--30, 1997 (Q2703844)

As the title implies, this is a collection of papers on editing scientific manuscripts, not mathematics. For mathematicians, of special interest is the contribution of \textit{R. Rashed}, on conceptual tradition and textual tradition, which tries to establish a systematics of recognizing which mss. represent the original text or intent of the author, and how to fill in lacunae that may not be retrievable in their original wording but may be retrievable in concept. This article should be read by every one interested in this field. A paper (\textit{H. M. Hamedani}) on the treatise `On the light of the moon' by Ibn al-Haytham, is a good complement to this paper.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEAnother important contribution is by \textit{P. Crozet}, on figures in Arabic geometric mss. The author shows that there is a linguistic difference between the figure as abstract representation and its realization by particular choices of points and lines. This is an interesting contribution to a future historic dictionary of mathematical Arabic. \textit{H. Bellosta} shows on the example of a Paris ms. that a ms. copied by a renowned mathematician, in this case al-Siğzī, is not necessarily better than that by a professional copyist. The other papers deal with editing astronomical (A. Dallal, J. Samsó, D. Pingree, R. Morelon) and medical texts.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThe articles of this volume will not be indexed individually.