MAD SCIENCE
This Persian physician and philosopher, who is said to have mastered the art of medicine by the age of 16, compiled the famous Canon of Medicine.
Who is Avicenna?
This region, also a modern-day country, was a manufacturing hub during the Islamic Golden Age, containing many glassworks as well as the city of Damascus where a namesake type of durable steel was forged.
What is Syria?
This branch of mathematics, involving the use of symbols representing unknown or variable quantities, was developed in the Islamic empire and has a name originating in Arabic.
What is algebra?
This Abbasid caliph, famed for his inclusion in many stories both during and after his time, presided over the peak of the Islamic Golden Age.
Who is Harun al-Rashid?
Many works by this intellectual, notably Physics, were first translated from Greek by scholars of the Islamic Golden Age.
Who is Aristotle?
This scientist who wrote Optics made many advancements in that field, discovering many of the basic functions of the eye and developing the camera obscura.
Who is Ibn al-Haytham?
This name is given to the western part of modern-day Saudi Arabia, where the important Islamic sites of Mecca and Medina are located.
What is the Hejaz?
The development of algebra is often attributed to this man, whose name lives on in English in the word “algorithm”.
Who is al-Khwarezmi?
This Abbasid caliph established the Baghdad House of Wisdom, in order to allow academics from throughout the empire to congregate in one place.
Who is al-Mamun?
This mathematician’s Elements was among the many works that were translated into Arabic out of necessity in the early days of the Islamic Golden Age.
Who is Euclid?
This Persian physician and philosopher, whose works often formed the basis of those of Avicenna, wrote the Comprehensive Book.
Who is al-Razi?
This river in central Asia, also giving its name to Kyrgyzstan’s northwesternmost region and the capital of Kazakhstan’s Jambyl Province, was the site of an important battle between the Abbasid Caliphate and the Chinese Tang dynasty, possibly introducing paper to the Arab world.
What is Talas?
Although more well-known for his literary works, this Persian polymath wrote about cubic equations in his Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra.
Who is Omar Khayyam?
This early Abbasid caliph founded what would become the city of Baghdad.
Who is al-Mansur?
This astronomical work by Ptolemy was translated from Greek during the Islamic Golden Age and gets its English name from Arabic.
What is the Almagest?
This chemist, many works of whom were likely written by others but are nonetheless attributed to him, is credited with the discovery of several acids, including hydrochloric acid and nitric acid
This region, giving its name to three modern-day provinces of Iran but having a much greater extent in Abbasid times, was the base of the revolutionary forces that defeated the Umayyad dynasty and helped establish the Abbasids.
What is Khorasan?
These three brothers worked at the Baghdad House of Wisdom in a variety of scientific fields including mathematics, often expanding on Archimedes’ ideas, especially regarding geometry.
Who are the Banu Musa?
This Abbasid caliph began hiring Turkic mercenaries to protect himself and his court, a decision which proved widely unpopular and forced him to temporarily move the capital out of Baghdad.
Who is al-Mutasim?
Among the more recent scientific writers whose works were translated during the Islamic Golden Age was this physician from Asia Minor, known for his descriptions of the Antonine Plague.
Who is Galen?
This surgeon from Cordoba wrote The Method, compiling techniques and instruments that could be used for surgery.
Who is Abu al-Qasim?
This region, equivalent to modern-day Mazandaran Province within Iran, was the birthplace of one of the first great Muslim historians, a man named Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Jarir of [this region].
What is Tabaristan?
This Persian mathematician was the first to describe binomial theorem, including what is now known as Pascal’s triangle.
Who is al-Karaji?
This Abbasid caliph, the father of Harun al-Rashid, made several successful incursions into the Byzantine Empire and renovated the Kaaba.
Who is al-Mahdi?
A compendium of this type of story, translated during the reign of al-Mansur from Sanskrit via Middle Persian, is considered the first Arabic literary work.
What is a fable?