Ban%C5%AB M%C5%ABs%C4%81 brothers
The three brothers Abū Jaʿfar, Muḥammad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir; Abū al-Qāsim, Aḥmad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir and Al-Ḥasan ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir, were Persian scholars who lived and worked in Baghdad. They are collectively known as the Banū Mūsā. The Banū Mūsā were the sons of Mūsā ibn Shākir, who was a well-known Astronomer of al-Ma'mun, a son of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid. After their father's death, the brothers received an education under al-Ma'mun’s direction, and were enrolled at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. There they undertook the translation of ancient Greek works acquired from Byzantium, which they used to develop their own technological, mathematical and astronomical ideas. They were some of the earliest scholars to adopt Greek mathematics, but innovative in their approach to the concepts of area and circumference by expressing them using numerical values instead of ratios. They made geodesic measurements to determine the length of a degree of latitude, and so obtained a relatively accurate value for the circumference of the Earth. The Banū Mūsā wrote almost 20 books, all but three of which are now lost. The most important of all their works was a treatise on geometry, Kitāb Maʿrifah masāḥat al-ashkāl al-basīṭah wa-al-kuriyyah, which was used extensively by medieval mathematicians. Their most famous extant work is Kitab al-Hiyal al-Naficah. It describes 100 inventions, many of which were pouring vessels, intended to entertain party guests. Some of their innovations, such as those that involved fluid pressure variations and valves, remained unsurpassed until the modern period. One of those inventions includes an automatic flute player that may have been the first programmable machine or computer.
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