Polygons and Polyphony: Traditions of Arabic Geometry in the Post-Classical Islamicate World | Julia Tomasson

The period after the so-called “Golden Age of Islam” has been largely dismissed as a time of radical "decline," often blamed on the “dogmatism” of Islam and evidenced by a deluge of derivative commentaries on their more illustrious predecessors, with little original work of their own. Recent trends in post-classical (~14th-18th centuries CE) Islamic intellectual history, however, have sought to reclaim this period as intellectually dynamic, with a set of epistemic priorities that were coherent, albeit different from our own. In this talk, I examine a set of mathematical manuscripts on geometry to demonstrate that these were not “mere commentaries” nor merely Greek mathematics in Arabic (as is routinely claimed). Rather, these texts show that in the postclassical period, there was a distinct shift away from Greek epistemologies and discursive traditions to new Islamic ones into which they wrote their achievements. 

Julia Tomasson is an Assistant Professor of Premodern Science and Technology at Rice University.  Tomasson is a scholar of global histories of science and mathematics, early modernity, the post-classical Islamicate world, and the history of ideas and knowledge more broadly.  Her work historicizes epistemic concepts that we take for granted like reason, proof, and authority, drawing upon examples from across Afro-Eurasia, grounded in manuscript material from Fez to Oxford to Isfahan. She recently completed her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and her A.B. in HiPSS (History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science) from the University of Chicago. She is in the process of turning her  dissertation into a first monograph tentatively entitled: “Polygons and Polyphony: Arabic Mathematics after the Golden Age.”