No record of it exists except as a refutation. & the only record of the refutation is a fragment of a manuscript without provenance, attributed by the late Umberto Allegrezza, on the basis of stylistic & scribic elements, to Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi, better known as al-Khwarizmi, astronomer, the inventor of algebra, & rumoured to be author of a lost or — rather — hidden treatise on calculus & which, it has been claimed, was the basis for both Isaac Newton's method of fluxions and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz' integral notation.
The manuscript records the thoughts of al-Khwarizmi on a homily by his contemporary Photius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, adherent to a different religion, entitled "All Life is an Accident Waiting to Happen", aware that it was an ironic title since what Photius was advocating was the exact opposite.
al-Khwarizmi's piece has an equally ironic title; "All Accidents are a Life Waiting to Happen".
Yay! Sounds intriguing.
ReplyDeletei'm ready to read another one.
ReplyDeletei printed out the entire last ficcone in book form to read through, and i enjoyed it immensely