…but you may not actually want to thank some of them!
Today, August 7th 2018, is celebrated by a Google Doodle as it is Ibn Sina’s 1038th birthday. Woooo – that’s a LOT of candles!! ‘But, who on earth was Ibn Sina?’, most people would probably ask. Until my visit to Uzbekistan earlier this year, I would have asked that too. However, having had the pleasure of Sanjar’s detailed stories of the great and good [and a few not-so-good] people in Uzbek history, I now know exactly who this amazing person was.
These rather wonky pictures are of the frontage to the Afrasiab** museum in Samarkand; it commemorates many of the great scientists and thinkers who once lived in this region. Among them, though I couldn’t tell you who’s who, is Ibn Sina who is regarded as the founder of medicine*. Also featured here, somewhere, is the founder of geometry [yup, you may wish to join me in throwing old cabbages at him!] [Here I copy and paste, unashamedly, from Wikipedia]
The word algebra comes from the Arabic الجبر (al-jabr lit. “the reunion of broken parts”) from the title of the book Ilm al-jabr wa’l-muḳābala by the Persian mathematician and astronomer al-Khwarizmi.
So, it’s all his fault we suffered during maths lessons – now you know.
Clever stuff……..
Another remarkable personality from the region is Ulugh Beg***.
He was an Amir who preferred studying astronomy to the tedious business of ruling his country. He built an amazing observatory which was only [re-] discovered in 1908 but, thankfully, is now preserved for posterity.
The top of the observatory
Incidentally, this character is also one of the founders of the study of trigonometry – form an orderly queue with those cabbages, please.
More clever [astronomical] stuff……the first is the view down the tunnel-thing, the 2nd is a picture of the ramp-style design to move the clever thingummy, and the 3rd is a cross-section of how it originally would have looked.
So, whenever you visit the doctor, or struggle to help your kids with their maths homework, or think how amazingly clever Brian May and Brian Cox must be….remember…it’s all down to the remarkable Uzbeks.
The Travelling Hamster 