Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) was a Muslim scientist, polymath, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher, described in various sources as either Persian or Arab. He made significant contributions to the principles of optics, as well as to physi...

Avicenna is the Latinate form of Ibn-Sina. He was a Persian polymath regarded both in Europe and the Middle East as one of the most significant thinkers and writers of the Islamic Golden Age. He is known to have written around 450 works acr...

Omar Khayyam was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and poet. He was born in Nishabur, in northeastern Iran, and spent most of his life near the court of the Karakhanid and Seljuq rulers in the period which witnessed the Firs...

Averroës is the Latinized form of Ibn Rushd, a mediæval Andalusian Muslim polymath. He wrote on logic, Aristotelian and Islamic philosophy, theology, the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence, psychology, political and Andalusian classical...

Moses Maimonides is regarded by many as the greatest Jewish philosopher ever. As a doctor, rabbi, religious scholar, mathematician, astronomer, and commentator on the art of medicine, his influence has spanned centuries and cultures. He was...

Saint Dominic (Spanish: Domingo), also known as Dominic of Osma, often called Dominic de Guzmán and Domingo de Guzmán Garcés was the founder of the Friars Preachers, popularly called the Dominicans or Order of Preachers, a Catholic religiou...

Roger Bacon was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods. He is sometimes credited (mainly since the nineteenth century) as one of the earliest European ad...

Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli was an Italian mathematician, astronomer, and cosmographer. Toscanelli is noted for his observations of comets and the painstaking calculation of their orbits. Among these was the comet of 1456; only named Halley'...

Johannes Müller von Königsberg, today best known by the Latin epithet Regiomontanus, was a German mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, translator, instrument maker and Catholic bishop. He was born in the Franconian village of Unfinden,...

Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance- and Reformation-era mathematician and astronomer who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe, likely independently of Aristarchus of S...

John Dee was a noted British mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. He also devoted much of his life to alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy. Dee straddled the worlds of science and...

William Gilbert, also known as Gilberd, was an English physician, physicist and natural philosopher. He was an early Copernican, and passionately rejected both the prevailing Aristotelian philosophy and the Scholastic method of university t...

Tycho Brahe was born in Skane, then in Denmark, now in Sweden. His contributions to astronomy were enormous. He not only designed and built instruments, he also calibrated them and checked their accuracy periodically. He thus revolutionized...

Giordano Bruno was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, and cosmological theorist. He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended the then-novel Copernican model. He proposed that the stars w...

John Napier was a Scottish mathematician, physicist, astronomer & astrologer, and also the 8th Laird of Merchistoun. He was the son of Sir Archibald Napier of Merchiston. John Napier is most renowned as the discoverer of the logarithm. Napi...