New Open Access Publication: Al-Hawārī’s “Essential Commentary”: Arabic Arithmetic in the Fourteenth Century by Mahdi Abdeljaouad and Jeffrey Oaks
An open access critical edition of a 14th-century classic Arabic mathematical text has been published in the Edition Open Sources series under the co-sponsorship of the Department of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, the University of Oklahoma Libraries, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. The book, Al-Hawārī’s “Essential Commentary”: Arabic Arithmetic in the Fourteenth Century, was translated, edited, and produced by Mahdi Abdeljaouad (Université de Tunis) and Jeffrey Oaks (University of Indianapolis).
The EOS volume includes the full content of the text of the 14th-century book drawn from several extant Arabic manuscripts; an English translation of the book; a passage-by-passage mathematical, conceptual, and historical commentary; and an introduction to Arabic arithmetic.
The book is number fourteen in the innovative Edition Open Sources (EOS) series that provides open access to primary source works in the history of science published together with critical notes and commentary. This open access edition is written for a multidisciplinary readership, including not only historians of science but also mathematicians on any level, with extensive explanatory annotations and commentary. The work can be found on the EOS site here.
The series editors for this volume were Stephen Weldon (Chair, Department of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine) and Kerry Magruder (Curator and John H. and Drusa B. Cable Chair of the History of Science Collections). OU Libraries’ Amanda Schilling served as technical editor on the OU side, working closely with her Berlin counterpart, Klaus Thoden.
