The Historical Significance of the Commentary on Theodosius’ Sphaerica Tradition importance: al-Ḥawāshī al-Bāqirīyyah

Spherics is a branch of ancient and medieval mathematics, which, due to its vast textual corpus, including redactions, commentaries, and scholia, has been constituted as a scientific tradition in the Islamic civilization. This tradition, although as a piece of mathematical knowledge, mainly involves cases in spherical trigonometry, and these cases were often used as a preliminary knowledge for solving astronomical problems. Theodosius Sphaerica and Menelaus Sphaerica are two prominent works in this field which are inherited to Islamic scholars from Greek science. In the Islamic civilization, these two works were translated to Arabic and they were subject to further investigations in the form of marginal notes. In this tradition, Tusi’s redaction of Theodosius Sphaerica has a pivotal role, and after that, the scholia of Mullā Muḥammad Bāqir Yazdi were prevalent among scholars. In this paper, while introducing the various manuscripts of the Yazdi’s scholia treatise, also we try to answer the question of why these marginal notes on a specific mathematical book should have been of such importance