How Islamic inventors changed the world

[xchrom]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/how-islamic-inventors-changed-the-world-469452.html

1 The story goes that an Arab named Khalid was tending his goats in the Kaffa region of southern Ethiopia, when he noticed his animals became livelier after eating a certain berry. He boiled the berries to make the first coffee. Certainly the first record of the drink is of beans exported from Ethiopia to Yemen where Sufis drank it to stay awake all night to pray on special occasions. By the late 15th century it had arrived in Mecca and Turkey from where it made its way to Venice in 1645. It was brought to England in 1650 by a Turk named Pasqua Rosee who opened the first coffee house in Lombard Street in the City of London. The Arabic qahwa became the Turkish kahve then the Italian caffé and then English coffee.

2 The ancient Greeks thought our eyes emitted rays, like a laser, which enabled us to see. The first person to realise that light enters the eye, rather than leaving it, was the 10th-century Muslim mathematician, astronomer and physicist Ibn al-Haitham. He invented the first pin-hole camera after noticing the way light came through a hole in window shutters. The smaller the hole, the better the picture, he worked out, and set up the first Camera Obscura (from the Arab word qamara for a dark or private room). He is also credited with being the first man to shift physics from a philosophical activity to an experimental one.

3 A form of chess was played in ancient India but the game was developed into the form we know it today in Persia. From there it spread westward to Europe - where it was introduced by the Moors in Spain in the 10th century - and eastward as far as Japan. The word rook comes from the Persian rukh, which means chariot.

4 A thousand years before the Wright brothers a Muslim poet, astronomer, musician and engineer named Abbas ibn Firnas made several attempts to construct a flying machine. In 852 he jumped from the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba using a loose cloak stiffened with wooden struts. He hoped to glide like a bird. He didn't. But the cloak slowed his fall, creating what is thought to be the first parachute, and leaving him with only minor injuries. In 875, aged 70, having perfected a machine of silk and eagles' feathers he tried again, jumping from a mountain. He flew to a significant height and stayed aloft for ten minutes but crashed on landing - concluding, correctly, that it was because he had not given his device a tail so it would stall on landing. Baghdad international airport and a crater on the Moon are named after him.

[MADem]

1. It's a great list. I'm amused by this somewhat ironic achievement:

6 Distillation, the means of separating liquids through differences in their boiling points, was invented around the year 800 by Islam's foremost scientist, Jabir ibn Hayyan, who transformed alchemy into chemistry, inventing many of the basic processes and apparatus still in use today - liquefaction, crystallisation, distillation, purification, oxidisation, evaporation and filtration. As well as discovering sulphuric and nitric acid, he invented the alembic still, giving the world intense rosewater and other perfumes and alcoholic spirits (although drinking them is haram, or forbidden, in Islam). Ibn Hayyan emphasised systematic experimentation and was the founder of modern chemistry.

[msongs]

2. you did not indicate how being "islamic" had anything to do with the "inventions" nt

[malthaussen]

3. Not to Knock the Independent

But in re point 18, the rotundity of the earth was taken for granted well before the rise of al-Islam. In fact, it was one of those things the ancient Greeks figured out centuries before the Common Epoch. It is also strange that they fail to mention what may be the greatest of Islamic inventions, the zero. Point 14 alludes to the "numbering system," but does not sufficiently emphasize this critical invention.


-- Mal

[Vehl]

4. The Zero was invented by the Hindus, not the Arabs

It is a common myth that the Arabs invented the numeral system used today, along with the zero. In fact that merely served as a conduit for the Indian system to the Europeans, who then assumed it was invented by the Arabs.

The word "Zero" derives from the Arabic word "Sifer" which in turn derives from the Sanskrit word "Sunya".
(which btw was first conceived as a philosophical concept (with its origins in the Hindu Upanishads/Vedantic philosophy) to signify something that is at both valueless and is the most valuable. )

Even to this day, the vast majority of Americans still believe that the Arabs invented the Zero and the numerals, due to the fact that till a few years ago most of the school textbooks still used to claim that the Arabs invented the zero. The newer books have the corrections.

Furthermore a lot of what was attributed to al-kawazami was in fact also from India, especially stuff regarding math. For example, the Indians and the Chinese had invented a lot of stuff attributed to the Greeks(and later the Arabs), even before they were invented in Greece, notably Phythogorian theorem, Quadratic equations, and even calculus.

The method known as "Modus Indorum" or the method of the Indians have become our algebra today. This algebra came along with the Hindu Number system to Arabia and then migrated to Europe. The earliest known Indian mathematical documents are dated to around the middle of the first millennium BCE (around the 6th century BCE)

"On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals" written about 825, was principally responsible for spreading the Indian system of numeration throughout the Middle East and Europe. It was translated into Latin as Algoritmi de numero Indorum. Al-Khwārizmī, rendered as (Latin) Algoritmi, led to the term "algorithm".

more here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_algebra
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_mathematics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_mathematics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_algebra

:)

PS: Btw Al-Khawarizmi was a Persian, not an Arab, yet most publications call him an Arab.Imho the textbooks on the history of mathematics needs to be revamped to better reflect new discoveries and facts which have been brought to light in the past century and a half.


PPS: Yes, as you correctly pointed out, the rotundity of the earth was well established centuries before.

[DavidDvorkin]

5. "Camera obscura" is from Latin

"Camera" is a kind of room in Latin. Possibly the Arabs adapted the Latin word.

The name of coffee comes from the name of that area of Ethiopia, which may in turn have given rise to the Arabic word.

A lot of the science, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy that Europe got from the Arab world actually came originally from the Persian Empire, from which the Arabs, and the Greeks before them, learned it.