Benno van Dalen

Research Interests

At the moment, I am working on a revised «Survey Of Islamic Astronomical Tables». The original monograph with this title was published by E.S. Kennedy in 1956 (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society N.S. 46-2, reprinted in 1989) and included brief descriptions of little more than 100 Islamic astronomical handbooks with tables (so-called zîjes), extensive abstracts of 12 of these, a classification of the subjects dealt with, and preliminary conclusions concerning the relations between and the developments in the production of Islamic astronomical handbooks. Nowadays, around 250 zîjes are known, of which nearly 150 are extant in more or less complete form, but only very few have been published or investigated in detail.

The revised Zîj Survey will include at least the following:

• A complete list of all zîjes that are now known, with information in a standardized form on the author and the locality and time of compilation, references to primary and secondary literature, and, for the extant works, a table of contents and description of available manuscript sources.
• Descriptions of the ways in which various topics in zîjes were treated in the course of the history of Islamic astronomy. These descriptions will be based on representative groups of around 30 zîjes, and will concern in particular topics that have received little attention so far, such as the computation of eclipses and mathematical astrology.
• A systematic exposition of the underlying astronomical parameters of as many as possible extant zîjes. These parameters can be rapidly determined by means of recently developed mathematical techniques and computer programs and can in many cases be used to establish relationships between zîjes.

Investigation of the achievements of the Muslim astronomers who were brought to China by the Mongols in the early Yuan Dynasty (around 1270). The available sources for this investigation are:

1. The Huihui-li (c. 1384), a Chinese translation of a presumably Persian astronomical handbook with tables (a so-called zîj), known to have been available in China in the beginning of the Yuan. The Huihui-li is extant in a number of somewhat different versions, apparently all deriving from a restoration of the original translation carried out by an officer of the Astronomical Bureau of the Ming dynasty in 1477.
2. The Sanjufînî Zîj, an Arabic astronomical handbook written for the Mongol viceroy of Tibet in 1366.
3. An Arabic or Persian manuscript at the Pulkovo Observatory (near St. Petersburg in Russia), which was obtained in China in the 19th century and contains only a small set of astronomical tables.

During my doctoral research (under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Henk Bos and Dr. Jan Hogendijk of the Mathematical Institute of Utrecht University, Netherlands) I concentrated on the development and application of statistical and numerical tools for the analysis of ancient and medieval astronomical tables. In a number of examples in my doctoral thesis Ancient and Mediaeval Astronomical Tables I used these tools to derive the mathematical structure and underlying parameters of a number of tables which had thus far defied explanation.
        Furthermore, I wrote user-friendly computer programs for DOS-PC, by means of which various tasks frequently occurring in research on medieval astronomy can be conveniently carried out. These include: sexagesimal calculations (also with trigonometric functions); calendar conversions; input, analysis and output of trigonometric, spherical-astronomical, and (pseudo-linear) mean motion tables as they occur in Ptolemaic astronomy.
        During a stay at the Institute for History of Science in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) in 1997/1998 I developed a computer database of parameter values occurring in medieval Islamic astronomical texts and tables. This database relies heavily on the hand-written parameter file of Prof. E.S. Kennedy. It includes parameter values directly quoted in primary and secondary sources, as well as values «squeezed» or otherwise estimated from tables.

Links

• Curriculum Vitae
• List of Publications
• Computer programs
  

• Historia Mathematica: Elsevier's journal webpage
• Historia Mathematica: electronic version at Science Direct
  
• From China to Paris (eds. Y. Dold-Samplonius, B. van Dalen, et al.): Steiner Verlag publication information
• From China to Paris: order from Amazon.de
• International Conference "Certainty, Doubt, Error: The production of knowledge and its impediments in the practice of pre- and early-modern sciende", held on November 17 and 18, 2001 at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main
• Symposium Aspects of Early Astronomy and Mathematics: Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Islamic Middle Ages, held on July 7, 2006 at the Institut für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften of Frankfurt University
• Symposium India and Islam: Episodes from the History of pre-Modern Astronomy, held on July 16, 2007 at the Institut für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften of Frankfurt University
• International Conference "Between Orient and Occident: Transformation of Knowledge", held on November 6 and 7, 2009, at the Lehrstuhl für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften of the Ludwig Maximilians University, Deutsches Museum, München
  

• Homepage of the former Institute for History of Science in Frankfurt (Germany)
• Homepage of the Lehrstuhl für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften in Munich (Germany)
  
• Homepage of the Arbeitsgruppe Wissenschaftsgeschichte at the Historical Department of Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany)
  
• Homepage of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Bonn, Germany)
• Homepage of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany)
• Webpage of the Commission on History of Science & Technology in Islamic Societies
• Preliminary Selective Bibliography of Islamic Mathematics prepared by Jan Hogendijk
• Bibliography of Medieval Islamic Mathematics by Jeff Oaks
  

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