Avempace

Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Yahya ibn Bajja was born around 1085 and ranged across astronomy, medicine, mathematics, music, poetry, and philosophy with equal command. He authored the Kitāb an-Nabāt, a botany text that distinguished the sex of plants, and pioneered a phenomenology of the soul that he never completed. His commentary on Aristotle circulated widely despite never being translated from Arabic to Latin; his theories on projectile motion, preserved in "Text 71," shaped medieval thought and later informed Galileo's mechanics. His philosophical work influenced Ibn Rushd and Albertus Magnus. His diwan of poetry, lost for centuries, surfaced in 1951. He died in 1138, leaving a body of work mostly unfinished but whose fragments traveled farther than most complete texts ever do.