Ulugh Beg

Ulugh Beg
Forensic facial reconstruction
Born	c. 1393 or 1394 Sultaniyeh (Persia)
Died	October 27, 1449
Occupation	astronomer, mathematician and sultan
Known for	trigonometry and spherical geometry
Relatives	Timur, Shah Rukh

Ulugh Beg (Chaghatay/Persian: (میرزا محمد طارق بن شاه رخ (الغ‌بیگ Mīrzā Mohammad Tāregh bin Shāhrokh (Ulugh Beg) - also Uluğ Bey, Ulugh Bek and Ulug Bek) (c. 1393 or 1394 in Sultaniyeh (Persia) – October 27, 1449) was a Timurid ruler as well as an astronomer, mathematician and sultan. His commonly known name is not truly a personal name, but rather a moniker, which can be loosely translated as "Great Ruler" or "Patriarch Ruler" and was the Turkic equivalent of Timur's Perso-Arabic title Amīr-e Kabīr^[1]. His real name was Mīrzā Mohammad Tāregh bin Shāhrokh. Ulugh Beg was also notable for his work in astronomy-related mathematics, such as trigonometry and spherical geometry.

Early life

He was the grandson of the conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) (1336-1405) and oldest son of Shah Rukh, both of whom came from the Mongol Barlas tribe of Transoxiana (then Persia, now Uzbekistan). His mother was the Persian noble Goharshad. Like his grandfather Timur, he was also the ancestor of Babur, founder of Mughal Dynasty. Ulugh Beg was born in Sultaniyeh in Iran. As a child he wandered through a substantial chunk of the Middle East and India as his grandfather expanded his conquests in those areas. With Timur's death, however, and the accession of Ulugh's father to much of the Timurid Empire, he settled in Samarkand which had been Timur's capital. After Shah Rukh moved the capital to Herat (in modern Afghanistan), sixteen-year-old Ulugh Beg became the shah's governor in Samarkand in 1409. In 1411 he became a sovereign of the whole Mavarannahr khanate.

Science

The teenaged ruler set out to turn the city into an intellectual center for the empire. In 1417-1420 he built a madrasa ("university" or "institute") on Registan Square in Samarkand, and invited numerous Islamic astronomers and mathematicians to study there. The madrasa building still survives. Ulugh Beg's most famous pupil in mathematics was Ghiyath al-Kashi (circa 1370 - 1429).

Ulugh Beg's observatory in Samarkand. In Ulugh Beg's time, these walls were lined with polished marble.

Astronomy

His own particular interests concentrated on astronomy, and in 1428 he built an enormous observatory, called the Gurkhani Zij, similar to Tycho Brahe's later Uraniborg as well as Taqi al-Din's Istanbul observatory of al-Din. Lacking telescopes to work with, he increased his accuracy by increasing the length of his sextant; the so-called Fakhri Sextant had a radius of circa 36 meters (118 ft) and the optical separability of 180" (seconds of arc). Using it he compiled the 1437 Zij-i-Sultani of 994 stars, generally considered the greatest of star catalogues between those of Ptolemy and Brahe, alongside Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi's Book of Fixed Stars. The serious errors which he found in previous Arabian star catalogues (many of which had simply updated Ptolemy's work, adding the effect of precession to the longitudes) induced him to redetermine the positions of 992 fixed stars, to which he added 27 stars from Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi's catalogue Book of Fixed Stars from 964, which were too far south for observation from Samarkand. This catalogue, one of the most original of the Middle Ages, was edited by Thomas Hyde at Oxford in 1665 under the title Tabulae longitudinis et latitudinis stellarum fixarum ex observatione Ulugbeighi by G. Sharpe in 1767, and in 1843 by Francis Baily in vol. xiii. of the Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In 1437 Ulugh Beg determined the length of the sidereal year as 365.2570370...^d = 365^d 6^h 10^m 8^s (an error +58^s). In his measurements within many years he used a 50 m high gnomon. This value was improved by 28^s 88 years later in 1525 by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), who appealed to the estimation of Thabit ibn Qurra (826-901), which was accurate to +2^s.

The above-ground portion of Ulugh Beg's observatory was destroyed shortly after his death; the surviving underground chamber was excavated in 1908 by primary school teacher and amateur archaeologist Vladimir Viyatkin, later Samarkand's director of antiquities.^[2]

Mathematics

In mathematics, Ulugh Beg (14th century) wrote accurate trigonometric tables of sine and tangent values correct to 8 decimal places.

Ulugh Beg and his astronomical observatory scheme, depicted on the 1988 USSR stamp. He was one of Islam's greatest astronomers during the Middle Ages.

Death

Ulugh's scientific prowess was not matched by his administrative skills. He lost some battles to rival kingdoms, and in 1448 massacred the people of Herat after defeating Mirza Ala-u-dowleh, son of Bai sunqur. Within two years he was beheaded by his own eldest son, 'Abd al-Latif while on his way to Mecca. Eventually he was rehabilitated by his relative Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire, who placed Ulugh Beg's remains in the tomb of Timur in Samarkand, found by archeologists in 1941.

In honour of his achievements the Ulugh Beigh crater on the Moon was named after him by the German astronomer Johann Heinrich von Mädler in his 1830 map of the Moon.

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Ulugh Beg

• Muslim scholars

Notes

References

• O'Connor, John J. & Robertson, Edmund F., "Ulugh Beg", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive 
• 1839. L. P. E. A. Sedillot (1808-1875). Tables astronomiques d’Oloug Beg, commentees et publiees avec le texte en regard, Tome I, 1 fascicule, Paris. A very rare work, but referenced in the Bibliographie generale de l’astronomie jusqu’en 1880, by J.
• 1847. L. P. E. A. Sedillot (1808-1875). Prolegomenes des Tables astronomiques d’Oloug Beg, publiees avec Notes et Variantes, et precedes d’une Introduction. Paris: F. Didot.
• 1853. L. P. E. A. Sedillot (1808-1875). Prolegomenes des Tables astronomiques d’Oloug Beg, traduction et commentaire. Paris.
• Le Prince Savant annexe les étoiles, Frédérique Beaupertuis-Bressand, in Samarcande 1400-1500, La cité-oasis de Tamerlan : coeur d'un Empire et d'une Renaissance, book directed by Vincent Fourniau, éditions Autrement, 1995, ISSN 1157 - 4488.
• L'âge d'or de l'astronomie ottomane, Antoine Gautier, in L'Astronomie, (Monthly magazine created by Camille Flammarion in 1882), December 2005, volume 119.
• Le recueil de calendriers du prince timouride Ulug Beg (1394-1449), Antoine Gautier, in Le Bulletin, n° spécial Les calendriers, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, juin 2007, pp. 117-123.
• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

External links

• The observatory and memorial museum of Ulugbek
• Bukhara Ulugbek Madrasah
• Registan the heart of ancient Samarkand.
• Biography by School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland
• Legacy of Ulug Beg

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