Between the eighth and fifteenth centuries, scholars and researchers working from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba in Spain took our knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine and philosophy to new heights; Musa al-Khwarizmi, for instance, who developed algebra; Al-Jazari, a Turkish engineer of the thirteenth century whose achievements include the crank, the camshaft, and the reciprocating piston; and Ibn Sina, whose textbook Canon of Medicine was a standard work in Europe's universities until the 1600s.
These scientists were part of a...

From Musa al-Khwarizmi, who developed algebra in ninth-century Baghdad, to al-Jazari, a 13th-century Turkish engineer whose achievements include the crank, the camshaft and the reciprocating piston, Ehsan Masood tells the amazing story of one of history's most misunderstood yet rich and fertile periods in science, via the scholars, research, and science of the...