The modern world of science is very exciting. New technologies and breakthroughs have happened on a scale never seen before. Many ancient civilizations have contributed to our understanding of science, but it could be argued that the very foundations of modern scientific & mathematical teachings have their foundation in the Golden Age of Islamic Empires that existed in the 9th through 12th centuries. Throughout universities and towns, scientific learning was prizes in areas stretching from the Middle East westward to North Africa and eastward to Central Asia. Here we highlight some of those from those regions who contributed then and now.
THEN
Ibn Sina, also known as Abu Ali Sina, Pur Sina, and often known in the West as Avicenna, was a Persian polymath who is regarded as one of the most significant physicians, astronomers, thinkers and writers of the Islamic Golden Age, and the father of early modern medicine. He was born in 980 AD in Uzbekistan in Central Asia and died in 1037 in Iran. The impact of Ibn Sina's work cannot be over stated. He was the man to first recommend 40 days of isolation to prevent the spread of disease. This became the quarantine in Latin from the number 40- "quaranta". He wrote 2 amazing medical books The Book of Cures and The Canon of Medicine.
Al Khawrizmi whose Latinized name is Algorithmi, was a Persian polymath who produced vastly influential works in mathematics, astronomy, and geography. He was born in Iran and died in Baghdad, Iraq in 850 AD. Around 820 CE he was appointed as the astronomer and head of the library of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. It was while teaching at a university at the border of modern day Turkeminstan and Uzbekistan that he wrote his book about Hindu-Arabic numerals which explain the easiest, step-by-step way to solve a problem. This procedure was given the name Algorithm from the Latinized version of Khawrismi. In his book, he also wrote about a procedure to bring back numbers into order called "al-Jabr". This amazing mathematician became the father of modern Algebra.
Ḥasan Ibn al-Haythamwas a Muslim Arab mathematician, astronomer, and physicist of the Islamic Golden Age. He was born in Basra, Iraq in 965 AD and died in 1040 AD in Cairo, Egypt. He is often referred to as "the father of modern optics" He made significant contributions to the principles of optics and visual perception in particular. His most influential work is titled Book of Optics, written during 1011–1021. He was a polymath so he also wrote on philosophy, theology and medicine. Ibn al-Haytham was the first to explain that vision occurs when light reflects from an object and then passes to one's eyes. He was also the first to demonstrate that vision occurs in the brain, rather than in the eyes. Building upon a naturalistic, empirical method pioneered by Aristotle in ancient Greece, Ibn al-Haytham was an early proponent of the concept that a hypothesis must be supported by experiments based on confirmable procedures or mathematical evidence—an early pioneer in the scientific method five centuries before Renaissance scientists.
NOW
Zaha Hadid was a British Iraqi architect, artist, and designer recognized as a major figure in architecture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. She was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1950 and died in 2016. She was educated at the Univeristy of Beirut where she got her degree in architecture. Her artworks include The World (89 degrees) and MORE. She designed the Serpentine Museum of Modern Art in San Fransisco. She has designed buildings all over the world and garnered every top prize in architecture. She was given a knighthood in 2012 by Queen Elizabeth making her Dame Zaha Hadid.
Joanne Chory is an American plant biologist and geneticist. She is a professor and director of the Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory, at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is leading an innovative, scalable and bold approach to fight climate change by optimizing a plant's natural ability to capture and store carbon and adapt to diverse climate conditions. She was born in Boston to a Lebanese family in 1955. She received the 2018 Breakthrough Award in Life Science. Her work is instrumental in the fight to adapt to climate change.
Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci are the German couple with Turkish ethnicity who were instrumental in creating the first vaccine for SARS Covid-19. They founded their lab BioNTech in 2008 and produced the messenger RNA vaccine for Pfizer Pharmaceutical Company in 2020. He is an oncologist and she is a physician. Both of them have received Germany's highest prize, The Order of Merit, for their contribution to helping the world with this deadly pandemic.
Lebanese American surgeon Michael DeBakey (1908-2008) was a legendary physician, educator, and medical statesman. During a career spanning 75 years, his work transformed cardiovascular surgery, raised medical education standards, and influenced national health care policy. He pioneered dozens of operative procedures such as aneurysm repair, coronary bypass, and endarterectomy, which routinely save thousands of lives each year, and performed some of the first heart transplants. His inventions included the roller pump (a key component of heart-lung machines) as well as artificial hearts and ventricular assist pumps. From the small Baylor University School of Medicine in Houston, he built a premier medical center, and there trained several generations of top surgeons from all over the world.