Elaheh Kheirandish – författare

Like all classical Greek texts on science, Euclid's works on optics initially came to the West mainly through medieval Arabic texts and commentaries. While several Greek versions of the Optika were discovered and translated as early as the sixteenth century, sorting out what may have been Euclid's original has not been easy. This book presents a critical translation of an Arabic texts and of Arabic commentaries on the text, and places the whole in a historical context. The Optics is particularly interesting in that Euclid's text was considerably transformed in the process of translation into Arabic "equivalents"; in addition, several of the Arabic editions of Euclid's text (c. 300 BC) contained liberal admixtures of a much later book by Ptolemy (c. 200 AD) of the same title. What was referred to as "Euclid's Optics," the "Kitab Uqlidis fi Ikhtilaf al-manazir," thus became as much an exposition of an Arabic version of a visual theory as a translation of Euclid's ideas on the subject. In preparing this edition, Dr. Kheirandish has thus not only sorted out the various manuscript versions of Al-Manazir, but also related and unrelated texts that were often confused with it.

Renowned as great centres of learning, the cities of Baghdad and Isfahan were atthe heart of the Islamic civilization as rich capital cities and centres of intellectualthought. Their distinct cultural voices inspired a unique historical dialogue, whichfinds new expression in Baghdad and Isfahan, the story of how knowledge wastransmitted and transformed within Islamic lands, and then spread across Europe.Capturing the history of Baghdad and Isfahan from 750 to 1750, Elaheh Kheirandishdraws on the voices of court astronomers, mathematicians, scientists, mystics,jurists, statesmen and Arabic and Persian translators and scholars to document theextensive and lasting contribution of sciences from Islamic lands to the history ofscience. Kheirandish bases her narrative on a unique medieval manuscript and otherhistorical sources and the result is more than a thousand-year ‘tale of two cities’ – itis a city by city, and century by century, look at what it took to change the world.In a feat of travelogue and time travel, this unique book creates parallel storieswith modern and historical characters, crossing cities worldwide, and capturingchanges through time. Interweaving multiple narratives, histories, and futures, shecharts the possible paths – formalized and serendipitous, lost and recovered – bywhich knowledge itself is translated and transmitted across time and cultures.

Like all classical Greek texts on science, Euclid's works on optics initially came to the West mainly through medieval Arabic texts and commentaries. This book presents a critical translation of an Arabic texts and of Arabic commentaries on the text, and places the whole in a historical context.