ABSTRACT
Arabic optics is derived from Hellenistic optics and, one could even say, only from it. Arabic optics has borrowed from Hellenistic optics its questions, its concepts, its results, and even the different traditions into which it divided in the Alexandrian era. One could say that the first Arab scholars who worked on optics joined the school of Hellenistic authors – Euclid, Hero, Ptolemy, Theon, and plenty of others – and them only. Optics distinguishes itself for this reason from other sectors of Arabic mathematical sciences, astronomy for example, in the sense that it received no other legacies, non-Hellenistic, so minute was it, that pushed with some weight on its development.
