Hocendî

Mathematician and scholar of astronomy (B. 930, Hocend / Tashkent / Turkestan (Uzbekistan) – D. 1000). His full name was Muhammed Han Hamid el-Hamid b. el-Hıdır el-Hocendî. He lived in the period when another Turkish Muslim scholar Ebu’l-Vefa was producing important works in Baghdad. It is understood that he came from a family that trained rulers from the word “Han” in his genealogy. When Hilmi Ziya Ülken pointed the importance of Hocendî in our history in science, he evaluated that “It is revealed by the Turks in Islamic civilization, one of these Turkish scholars is Ebu’l-Mahmud el-Hocendî”.

After his initial education in Hocend, he was oriented to mathematics and other sciences, he grew up in the deep-rooted madrasahs in the Turkestan that was like universities of that period and was trained by the quality Turkish-Islamic scholars.

Hocendî examined the “X³+Y³+=Z^3” formula for the first time among the mathematicians of Islam and seriously dealt with this uncertain equation and showed that the equation could not be solved with integers. Thus, he became the mathematician who founded the equation in question before Fermat, who had tried to own the equation with the “Fermat's Theorem” title. The proof of this theorem that is referred as the “Fermat's Last Theorem” in the history of mathematics could only be made in 1995; according to that, it is understood that Hocendî had found this theorem 700 years before Fermat did.

This situation has been like this most of the time; western sources always stated the names of mathematicians in the Western world as the founder and developer of mathematics.

In fact, Europe improved the mathematics in between 8^th and 16^th centuries by making use of the major works that had been prepared by mathematicians of Turkish-Islamic world. The truth is; mathematicians of the Turkish-Islamic world fed the scientific thought and research sensitivity of the Western world by sparking it and brought in a new vitality in this field. They carried the West to a level where they could progress, based on their views and inventions on algebra, geometry, arithmetic and trigonometry. In fact, Halid bin Hıdır el-Hocendî revealed the integral equation, which stated that the sum of two cubes would never be a cube, hundreds of years before Fermat (1610-65).

Hocendî, who was also a talented scholar of astronomy, made astronomical observations in Rey in the middle of the 1600s and measured the “eclipse plane”, in other words, the slope of the elliptical.

El-Hocendî, who was one of the most famous mathematicians of his time, wrote works on astrolabe (astronomy measuring device), algebra and number theory. In these works he revealed interesting ideas and solutions compared to his time for the spherical triangles, solutions of the uncertain equations and sine equations. It is known that this great scholar of math, algebra and astrolabe closed his eyes to life in 1000. 

REFERENCE: Hamit Dilgan / Matematiğin Tarihi Tekâmülüne Bir Bakış (s. 14, 1955), Mehmet Bayraktar / İslâm’da Bilim ve Teknoloji Tarihi (s. 45, 1985), Şaban Döğen / Müslüman İlim Öncüleri Ansiklopedisi I (s. 344, 1987), İhsan Işık / Ünlü Bilim Adamları (Türkiye Ünlüleri Ansiklopedisi, C. 2, 2013) - Encyclopedia of Turkey’s Famous People (2013).