Edward Stewart Kennedy

Edward Stewart Kennedy (3 January 1912 in San Ángel, México D.F. – 4 May 2009 in Doylestown, Pennsylvania) was a historian of science specializing in medieval Islamic astronomical tables written in Persian and Arabic.

Edward S. Kennedy was born in Mexico in 1912, but the outbreak of civil strife a few years later obliged his American parents to move the family to his mother’s home town of Easton, Pennsylvania, where “Ted” and his two brothers were shortly joined by three more boys. He graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College in Easton in 1932 and then, in part because of the lack of job opportunities created by the Great Depression, accepted an appointment to teach at Alborz College, a secondary school for boys outside Tehran, Iran, run by the American Presbyterian Mission. He spent the next four years in Iran. Besides teaching, he coached the school basketball team and was Scoutmaster for the Alborz Boy Scout troop. He also became fluent in both spoken and written Farsi, and before leaving Iran co-authored the first Farsi translation of the Boy Scout Handbook. His time in Iran stimulated an interest in Islamic culture and history, and on his return to the US he entered Lehigh University to pursue a PhD in Mathematics, which he completed in 1939. He then joined the University of Alabama as an Assistant Professor, during which time he began to pursue research on medieval astronomical tables, called zijes in Persian and Arabic. A reserve officer in the US Army, he was called into active service in 1941. As one of the few American officers with a command of Farsi, he returned to Iran to be assistant military attaché in Tehran. Iran was a sensitive strategic interest to the US at the time, as the channel through which the Allies resupplied the Red Army in its struggle against the Nazis, and Kennedy was involved in efforts to monitor Soviet intentions in the Soviet-occupied northern part of the country while keeping track of German agents provocateurs throughout the region. With the close of the war, Kennedy returned briefly to the US to work with Dr. George Sarton at Harvard University, Massachusetts. It was at this time that he began a close working relationship and friendship with Dr. Otto Neugebauer, founder of the History of Mathematics Department at Brown University in Rhode Island, a relationship that was to last until Neugebauer’s death in 1990. With the focus of his research involving the reading of medieval manuscripts written in Arabic, in 1946 Kennedy accepted a professorship at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, in part with a mind to improve his knowledge of that language. In 1951 he married Mary Helen Scanlon, a teacher at what was then called the Beirut College for Women (now the Lebanese American University). Although Kennedy took periodic leaves to pursue his collaboration with Neugebauer at Brown, he continued to teach in the Mathematics Department for the American University of Beirut for the next 35 years, retiring in 1976 at the close of the first, most vicious phase of the civil war that afflicted Lebanon. Retirement from teaching implied no let-up in his research activities, with stays at the American Research Center in Egypt (1976-1978) and the Institute for the History of Arab Science in Aleppo, Syria (1978-1980). Plans to take up permanent residence in what had been their summer house in the mountains overlooking Beirut were thwarted first by the 1982 Israeli invasion and the consequent upsurge in sectarian conflict in Lebanon, and then by the rash of kidnappings of foreigners by militants. Professor and Mrs. Kennedy reluctantly left Lebanon permanently in 1984. Four years at the Institute for the History of Arab and Islamic Science in Frankfurt were followed by a move to Princeton, New Jersey, in 1989. Despite his many years abroad, Kennedy passed away at the age of 97 not far from his Easton boyhood home, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. E. S. Kennedy was instrumental in raising scholarly awareness of the richness and sophistication of the exact sciences in the medieval Islamic world through his translation and analysis of hitherto little-known Arabic manuscripts. Professor Emeritus at the American University of Beirut, he was made a member of the Order of al Istiqlal by Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan in 2001 for his contribution to the study of Islamic culture.

Publications

• A survey of Islamic astronomical tables, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, N. S. Vol. 46, Part 2, 1956. ISBN 0-87169-462-X
• (with Mohammad Saffouri & Adnan Ifram), Al-Bīrūnī on Transits. Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1959. Reprinted: Frankfurt am Main: Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 1988 (Islamic Mathematics and Astronomy 33).
• The Planetary Equatorium of Jamshīd Ghiyāth al-Dīn al-Kāshī (d. 1429). Princeton University Press: 1960.
• "The Exact Sciences in Iran under the Saljuqs and Mongols," in The Cambridge History of Iran Volume 5: The Saljuq and Mongol Periods, ed. J. A. Boyle. Cambridge University Press, 1968. ISBN 9780521069366
• "The History of Trigonometry" (Chapter 6 of Historical Topics for the Mathematics Classroom). Washington DC: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1969.
• "The Arabic Heritage in the Exact Sciences," Al-Abhath 23: 327-344 (1970).
• (with David Pingree) The Astrological History of Mā'shā'allāh. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. ISBN 9780674863965
• A Commentary upon Bīrunī's Kitaāb Taādīd [Nihāyāt] al-Amākin--An 11th century treatise on mathematical geography. Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1973. Reprinted: Frankfurt am Main: Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 1992.
• "The Exact Sciences during the Abbasid Period," in The Cambridge History of Iran Volume 4: The Period from the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs, ed. Richard Nelson Frye, Cambridge University Press, 1975. ISBN 9780521200936
• The Exhaustive Treatise on Shadows by Abu al-Rayḥān Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Bīrūnī, 2 vols. Aleppo: University of Aleppo, Institute for the History of Arabic Science, 1976.
• (with Imad Ghanem, eds.) The Life & Work of Ibn al-Shāṭir--An Arab Astronomer of the Fourteenth Century. Aleppo: University of Aleppo, Institute for the History of Arabic Science, 1976.
• (transl. with Fuad I. Haddad, commentary with David E. Pingree) The Book of the Reasons Behind Astronomical Tables (Kitāb fi 'ilal al-ziījāt) by 'Ali ibn Sulayman al-Hashimi. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, Delmar, 1981.
• "The Exact Sciences in Timurid Iran," in The Cambridge History of Iran Volume 6: The Timurid and Savafid Periods, eds. Peter Jackson & Lawrence Lockhart. Cambridge University Press, 1986. ISBN 9780521200943
• (with Mary Helen Kennedy) Geographical Coordinates of Localities from Islamic Sources. Frankfurt am Main: Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 1987.
• Studies in the Islamic Exact Sciences. Syracuse University Press, 1990. ISBN 978-0815660675
• On the Contents and Significance of the Khāqānī Zīj by Jamshīd Ghiyāth al-Dīn al-Kāshī (Islamic Mathematics and Astronomy volume 84). Frankfurt am Main: Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 1998.
• Astronomy and Astrology in the Medieval Islamic World. Aldershot UK: Ashgate/Variorum, 1998.
• (with Paul Kunitzsch and Richard P. Lorch) The Melon-Shaped Astrolabe in Arabic Astronomy. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999.
• "Al-Bīrūnī (or Bērūnī), Abū Rayḥān (or Abu'l-Rayḥān) Muḥammad Ibn Aḥmad", Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Encyclopedia.com (2008) [1970–80]

References

• Van Dalen, Benno; King, David A.; Samsó, Julio; Kennedy, Nora Wallace; Kennedy-Scanlon, Michael, In memoriam Edward S. Kennedy (1912 – 2009) — Includes eulogy, list of publications
• King, David A., & Saliba, George (eds.), From Deferent to Equant: A Volume of Studies in the History of Science in the Ancient and Medieval Near East in Honor of E. S. Kennedy. Special issue of Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 500 (1987), 569 pp.

See also

• Islamic astronomy
• Science in the medieval Islamic world
• Otto Neugebauer