Treatises on the Description and Use of the Sector (Pergâr-ı Nisbe) in Manuscript Collections of Turkey

POLAT A.

35th Scientific Instrument Symposium, İstanbul, Turkey, 26 - 30 September 2016, pp.31, (Summary Text)

  • Publication Type: Conference Paper / Summary Text
  • City: İstanbul
  • Country: Turkey
  • Page Numbers: pp.31
  • Istanbul University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

TREATISES ON THE DESCRIPTION AND USE OF THE SECTOR (PERGÂR-I NISBE) IN MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS OF TURKEY

The sector, called “Pergâr-ı Nisbe” in Ottoman Turkish, was one of the major mathematical instruments in use in Europe from the second half of the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century, and is an instrument based on the idea of the proportions between similar triangles, and thus has many practical applications in mathematics, geometry, surveying and military. There are many texts on the description and the use of the sector especially in French, English and German; however, until now there has been no study about the transfer of this instrument to Ottoman Turkey. We have determined two kind of sources for this paper: first, there are the instrument lists from the beginning of the nineteenth century at the engineering schools (mühendishanes) in Istanbul, in which we see nothing except the name of the instrument; second, there are the treatises on the description and the use of the sector written in Ottoman Turkish and held in different manuscript collections of Turkey. In this paper, we will mainly focus on these treatises in order to comprehend the introduction and use of this instrument among the Ottomans.