Reviewing an Encyclopedia is in Itself a Difficult Task, Reviewing a specific topic or a set of topics in that encyclopedia while the encyclopedia is still in progress is even more so. An encyclopedia is not a book, one cannot read it from cover to cover even when it is finished. It does not have an introduction, a thesis, an argument, and a conclusion. It is not supposed to establish the frontiers of research in any field or to raise any issues about the direction of such research or the degree to which such frontiers could be pushed; instead it is supposed to report on the state of the art. In short one does not expect to find in an encyclopedia answers to pressing problems in a specific field but guidelines as to where such problems may be found.

Furthermore, an encyclopedia is organized by entries (alphabetically ordered) and not by the logic of the thesis, and the entries are mostly devoted to persons who are deemed as having played important roles in the domain with which the encyclopedia is concerned.

Research in Islamic science over the last half century or so has clearly established that such old myths as Islamic science being a preservation of Greek science, or that science was always in conflict with religion in Islamic civilization as it was in Europe, or that the European scientific Renaissance was independent of outside influences –a European phenomenon par excellence– are now all subjects of great dispute if not altogether dead. In what follows I will illustrate the evidence that has put such myths into question with only few examples, since time and space do not allow me to elaborate more.

We report a patient who developed left ear pain, dry cough, and fever. The external auditory canal was tender, swollen, erythematous and full of debris. Later the patient developed widespread tender and red skin nodules and pustules that subsequently coalesced to form plaques. Identical lesions developed also in the external auditory canal and the tympanic membrane of the affected ear. Skin biopsy showed dermal neutrophilia, compatible with the diagnosis of Sweet’s syndrome. Rapid improvement was achieved with prednisone after the failure of antibiotics.

In this article the author analyzes a fifteenth-century Arabic reform of the Ptolemaic model for Mercury. The author of the reform was the Central Asian – Ottoman astronomer ‘Alā” al-Dīn al-Qushjī (d. 1474 A.D.) who, in his youth, had been instructed in the mathematical sciences by none other than the famous Central Asian monarch Ulugh Beg (1394–1449). Although the astronomers of Ulugh Beg's circle are known to have produced extensive astronomical Persian tables, no one other than Qushjī has been yet identified to have produced a theoretical text devoted to the criticism, let alone the reform, of the Ptolemaic mathematical planetary models. The present article on Qushji's reform of the Ptolemaic model for Mercury includes a critical first edition of Qushji's Arabic text, an English translation, and a historical and technical commentary.

This study was initiated to investigate the structural efficiency of the “bessbeetle” (Odontotaenius Disjunctus) as compared to typical “man-made” or synthetic composites. This synthetic laminate is configured according to standard composites design practices. In fact, an orthotropic unidirectional T300 tape with circular fibers and 60% fiber volume fraction is used. The specific ply orientation of the symmetric man-made composite is [0/+45/-45/90]2S. The natural laminate studied is unsymmetric with the individual plies made of the same orthotropic unidirectional T300 tape but with different ply orientation. Contrary to previous beliefs the natural composite did not assume a balance of inplane and bending properties which in essence mimic the behavior of isotropic behavior. The results of the efficiency of the natural composite for tension did not show any noticeable advantages while the pure bending case resulted in higher values for the principal stresses in the unsymmetric laminate.

In this article we study the development of the mathematical theorem, now known as the Tūsī Couple, and discuss the difference between its plane and spherical applications.

This paper surveys the results established so far by the on-going research on the planetary theories in Arabic astronomy. The most important results of the Maragha astronomers are gathered here for the first time, and new areas for future research are delineated. The conclusions reached demonstrate that the Arabic astronomical works mentioned here not only elaborate the connection between Arabic astronomy and Copernicus, but also that such activities, namely the continuous reformulation of Greek astronomy, were not limited to a specific group of astronomers or to a specific geographical area. It is shown that such activities were spread over a period of more than seven hundred years, from the early eleventh till the sixteenth century, and over an area stretching from the Andalusian peninsula in the west to the farthest reaches of Central Asia in the east.