Abu Ali al Hasan ibn al-Haytham

Abu Ali al Hasan ibn al-Haytham, known in the west as Alhazen was born in 965AD in the city of Basra in Southern Iraq. He was educated in Basra and Baghdad, and lived and died in Cairo, Egypt in the year 1040. Ibn al-Haytham was a mathematician, astronomer, and physicist of the Islamic Golden Age. Referred to as "the father of modern optics", he made significant contributions to the principles of optics and visual perception in particular. Ibn al-Haytham was the first to explain that vision occurs when light reflects from an object and then passes to one's eyes. He was also the first to demonstrate that vision occurs in the brain, rather than in the eyes. Ibn al-Haytham was an early proponent of the concept that a hypothesis must be supported by experiments based on confirmable procedures or mathematical evidence. Ibn al-Haytham was a prolific author. He wrote more than 200 works on a wide range of subjects, of which at least 96 of his scientific works are known, and approximately 50 of them have survived to date. The first real appreciation of the action of a lens, in particular the ability of a convex form to produce a magnified image of an object, appears to be credited to Ibn al-Haytham. He made a thorough examination of the passage of light through various media and discovered the laws of refraction. He also carried out the first experiments on the dispersion of light into its constituent colors. Ibn Al-Haytham’s seven volume treatise on optics, Kitab al-Manazer (Book of Optics), which he wrote between 1011 to 1021, has been ranked alongside Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica as one of the most influential books ever written in physics, drastically transformed the understanding of light and vision. A polymath, he also wrote on philosophy, theology and medicine.