Translating Playfair’s Geometry into Arabic: Mathematics and Missions

The paper describes the Arabic translation of John Playfair’s Elements of Geometry (first edition, London, 1795) by Cornelius VanDyck. Playfuir’s treatise was popular in nineteenth century Britain and even more popular in America, where it appeared in dozens of editions, condensations, and extracts. Van Dyck had gone to Beirut as a medical missionary in 1840 and spent more than fifty years in Beirut devoted to education, especially in the sciences. Perceiving a need for modem science textbooks in Arabic, he either translated or wrote more than a dozen textbooks. His translation of Playfair produced generally a literal rendition of the English text, including its “algebraic notation.” It also carefully preserved the basic architecture ofPlayfair’s treatise. At the same time, there appears to be a deliberate attempt to adopt a non-traditional technical terminology and a non-standard transliteration system for diagram labels. These choices probably reflect the mindset of the American missionary community — that education, especially in modern mathematics and the sciences, might be a tool for religious conversion as well as social reform. Apparently Van Dyck wished to accentuate the discontinuity between traditional Arabic Euclidean discourse and that of modem European mathematics. Van Dyclc’s translation was part of a larger movement to impon European learning in the sciences into the Ottoman Empire, so it faced potential competition from other Arabic and Turkish translations that were being printed in Istanbul and Cairo under the auspices of the Ottoman administration. Nevenheless, there is some bibliographic evidence that Van Dyck’s translation wasre printed at least once in Beirut.