( vii )
states, in two distinct passages, that its author, Mohammed ben Musa, was the first Mussulman who had ever written on the solution of problems by the rules of completion and reduction. Two marginal notes in the Oxford manuscript—from which the text of the present edition is taken—and an anonymous Arabic writer, whose Bibliotheca Philosophorum is frequently quoted by Casiri,[1] likewise maintain that this production of Mohammed ben Musa was the first work written on the subject[2] by a Mohammedan.
- ↑ تاريخ الحكماء, written in the twelfth century. Casiri Bibliotheca Arabica Escurialensis, t. i. 426. 428.
- ↑ The first of these marginal notes stands at the top of the first page of the manuscript, and reads thus: “This is the first book written on (the art of calculating by) completion and reduction by a Mohammedan: on this account the author has introduced into it rules of various kinds, in order to render useful the very rudiments of Algebra.” The other scholium stands farther on: it is the same to which I have referred in my notes to the Arabic text, p. 177.
هذا اول كتاب وضع في الجبر والمقابلة في الاسلام ولهذا ذكر فيه من كل فن طرفا ليفيد الاصول في الجبر والمقابلة
