The three Banu Musa brothers are almost indistinguishable and most of the information is at this link. However, there is some information specific to the youngest brother: al-Hasan ibn Musa ibn Shakir.
He wrote The elongated
circular figure which is a work on the
ellipse. This book is lost except for a fragment
in Hebrew of a compilation by Ibn al-Samh. From
this fragment Rashed in [3] deduces that al-Hasan
had two objectives. One objective was to measure
a curved area while the other was to study the
geometric properties of curves. Rashed claims,
as we have suggested above, that while
Archimedes' texts were being translated into
Arabic for the first time, the Banu Musa
(perhaps al-Hasan in particular) was trying to
give new proofs of the Greek results as well as
trying to prove results going beyond what the
Greeks had achieved.
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
November 1999
