al Tusi
Al Tusi was born in Persia in 1201 AD, as the Seljuk Empire was falling apart. The Seljuks were Turkic people, but al Tusi, like most of the people living near him, was of Persian descent, and he spoke Persian at home. He was from a Shiite, Sufi family. Al Tusi's father died when he was young, but he told his son to study hard and be a scholar. Al Tusi travelled from town to town, studying with many teachers. Some of al Tusi's teachers had been taught by men who had been taught by Ibn Sina, a hundred and fifty years earlier. Al Tusi admired Ibn Sina and wrote books defending Ibn Sina's work.
When al Tusi grew up, he joined the court of the Ismaili rulers of his area, and continued to write science and philosophy books.
Why did people want to punch Socrates?
Where did Egyptians bury your liver?
How old are the Rocky Mountains?
What does a half-timbered house look like?
How do you spin wool?
(a project)
When al Tusi was 55 years old, in 1256 AD, the Mongols invaded Ismaili territory, and al Tusi ended up going over to the Mongol side. He soon convinced the Mongol ruler, Hulegu Khan (a grandson of Genghis Khan), to build him a big astronomical observatory in Azerbaijan so he could study the question of whether the earth went around the sun. Thanks to his observatory, al Tusi was able to establish very accurate records of how the planets and the sun moved in relation to the earth, and he was able to show some problems in Ptolemy's ideas of how this worked. Al Tusi saw that the Milky Way was made of hundreds of thousands of stars, but he thought they must be very small, without realizing how far away they were. But without a working telescope, al Tusi couldn't see that, and he also couldn't see that the earth went around the sun.
To find out more about al Tusi, check out these books from Amazon or from your local library:
Ibn Sina
Sufism
Shiism
Mongols
Islamic Mathematics
Islamic Science
Main Islam page
History of Science
