Shams al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Khalīlī (Arabic: شمس الدين عبد الله محمد بن محمد الخليلي; 1320–1380) was a Mamluk-era Syrian astronomer who compiled astronomical tables. He worked for most of his life as a muwaqqit (a religious timekeeper) at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.[1]
Little is known about his life.
Work
Al-Khalili is known for two sets of mathematical tables he constructed, both totalling roughly 30,000 entries. He tabulated all the entries made by the celebrated Egyptian Muslim astronomer Ibn Yunus, except for the entries that al-Khalili made himself for the city of Damascus. He computed 13,000 entries into his 'Universal Tables' of different auxiliary functions which allowed him to generate the solutions of standard problems of spherical astronomy for any given latitude. In addition to this, he created a 3,000 entry table that gave the qibla (the direction of the city of Mecca) for all latitudes and longitudes for all the Muslim countries of the 14th century.[2][note 1] The values present in al-Khalili’s tables have been determined to be accurate up to three or four significant figures. It is not known how exactly al-Khalili went about calculating each of his entries.[3]
Notes
^Knowledge of the direction of the qibla is essential in Islam because Muslims pray in the direction of Mecca.[citation needed]
King, David A. (1981). "Khalīlī, Shams al-Dīn Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad Ibn Muḥammad al-". In Gillispie, Charles Coulston; Holmes, Frederic Lawrence (eds.). Dictionary of Scientific Biography. New York: Scribner. OCLC755137603 – via encyclopaedia.com.
