Determining the interdependence of historical astronomical tables.

From: Journal of the American Statistical Association | Date: March 1, 1997| Author: | Copyright information

A statistical method is developed to determine the existence of a link between tables in Claudius Ptolemy's Almagest and the tables of the 14th-century Islamic astronomer Shams al-Din al-Khalili. Nonparametric techniques are used to determine whether errors in one table may be observed in the other, or whether the dependent table is too precise to have been lifted from entries in the other table. Results show that Ptolemy's shadow length tables were computed from the latitude tables, and that al-Khalili computed his auxiliary tables in two stages and most likely the qibla table from them.

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