Shams al-Din Abu Abd Allah al-Khalili

Shams al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Khalīlī (Template:Langx; 1320–1380) was a Mamluk-era Syrian astronomer who compiled astronomical tables. He worked for most of his life as a (a religious timekeeper) at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.

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 (the direction of the city of Mecca) for all latitudes and longitudes for all the Muslim countries of the 14th century.Template:Refn 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.

Further reading

• (PDF version)