'Abd al-Hamīd ibn Turk

Who is 'Abd al-Hamīd ibn Turk?

ʿAbd al-Hamīd ibn Turk, known also as ʿAbd al-Hamīd ibn Wase ibn Turk Jili was a ninth-century Turkic Muslim mathematician. Not much is known about his biography. The two records of him, one by Ibn Nadim and the other by al-Qifti are not identical. However al-Qifi mentions his name as ʿAbd al-Hamīd ibn Wase ibn Turk Jili. Jili means from Gilan.

He wrote a work on algebra of which only a chapter called "Logical Necessities in Mixed Equations", on the solution of quadratic equations, has survived.

He authored a manuscript entitled Logical Necessities in Mixed Equations, which is very similar to al-Khwarzimi's Al-Jabr and was published at around the same time as, or even possibly earlier than, Al-Jabr. The manuscript gives exactly the same geometric demonstration as is found in Al-Jabr, and in one case the same example as found in Al-Jabr, and even goes beyond Al-Jabr by giving a geometric proof that if the determinant is negative then the quadratic equation has no solution. The similarity between these two works has led some historians to conclude that algebra may have been well developed by the time of al-Khwarizmi and 'Abd al-Hamid.