Abu al-Wafa' Buzjani
Persian mathematician and astronomer (940-998) · Academics · Died at 58
Abu al-Wafa' Buzjani is read about 58 times a day, in 50 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 16 September 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 60 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?A Persian mathematician working in tenth-century Baghdad who built the scaffolding modern trigonometry still stands on: the secant and cosecant functions, sine and tangent tables carved at fifteen-minute intervals, the arithmetic that first let medieval Islamic scholars write debts as negative numbers.
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About this person
Born in June 940, Abu al-Wafa' Buzjani spent his career in Baghdad pushing past the limits of the geometry he inherited. He rewrote spherical trigonometry with new precision, mapping the six trigonometric lines of an arc and how they spoke to each other. His arithmetic textbook for merchants broke ground by using negative numbers - the first time they appeared in a medieval Islamic text. He compiled tables of sines and tangents at fifteen-minute intervals, tools that would guide astronomers for centuries. His Almagest became required reading across the medieval Arabic world long after his death in July 998, though several other books he wrote have vanished.
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