Ibn al-Haytham
Arab physicist, mathematician and astronomer (c. 965 - c. 1040) · Scientists · Lived 965 to 1039 · aged 74
Ibn al-Haytham is read about 1,164 times a day, in 92 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 27 October 2026
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Something wrong?He proved light travels into the eye, not out from it - a fact that overturned a thousand years of assumption and cleared the ground for every lens, telescope, and theory of vision that followed.
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, Whosoever seeks the truth will not proceed by studying the writings of his predecessors and by simply accepting his own good opinion of them.
About this person
Born in Basra around 965, Ibn al-Haytham spent his working life in Fatimid Cairo, earning his keep writing treatises and tutoring nobles. Between 1011 and 1021 he completed the Kitāb al-Manāẓir, a systematic investigation of reflection, refraction, and image formation that survived in Latin and became a cornerstone text - Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Huygens all cited him centuries later. He was first to describe spherical aberration, the horopter, and color constancy, first to argue that vision happens in the brain and is shaped by experience, and first to insist that hypotheses be tested through experiment or mathematical proof. Dubbed "the Second Ptolemy" in his time and "the Physicist" later, he died around 1040, five centuries before the Scientific Revolution he helped script.
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