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Part 1
How Islamic scientists and mathematicians
contributed to modern day usage of numbers; the decimal point; the
early rise of Baghdad as a cultural center; Islamic political expansion;
the purpose of gaining knowledge; Arabic as the common language of the
early scientific revolution; the purpose of Arabic vowels; Arabic
calligraphy; The Translation Movement where new books were said to have
been paid for with their weight in gold; Islamic medicine and its
contributions to modern medicine - Galen and the humors, Greek, Indian
and Chinese medicine, traditional medicine; The Nur Al-Din hospital;
early Islamic understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs; the majlis
discussions and debates; Al-Khawarizmi and the combination of Greek
mathematical visualizations with Indian mathematic symbols to create
Algebra; the contribution of Algebra to everything that has followed in history; how early Islamic synthesis of worldwide ideas of science proved that science transcends political boundaries and religious affiliations.
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Part 2
The scientific renaissance of the medieval Islamic world; the sciences and governing an empire; Medina Al-Zahra' outside Cordoba in Spain; the Nile-o-meter - keeping track of the Nile's yearly floods and using this information for taxation; Al-Ma'mun, map-making, and how mathematics contributed to a better understanding of the circumference of the earth - Al-Biruni and the combination of algebraic and geometric principles to estimate the size of the world; the scientific method and experimentation; the effects of the interaction between crafting traditions and trade with the sophisticated scholarship in the medieval Islamic world; carrier pigeons and their use in trade; mass production; useful alchemy and its eventual development into modern chemistry: industrial-scale soap manufacturing - alkaline substances - glass-making - metallurgy - perfume markets and distillation - weaponry based on petroleum and an improvement on Greek fire - the periodic table - the first classification based on observation vs. philosophy; physics (the science of change): the useable combination of mathematical forms and experimental observation to form a philosophical understanding of real-world change; Ibn Al-Haytham and the scientific method - the modern science of optics - the modern understanding of light and vision - the beginning of understanding physics in a mathematical context and the providing of repeatable experiments - a first explanation of reflection and refraction - the camera obscura - an estimation deduced from these ideas of the thickness of the earth's atmosphere based on the refraction of the sun's rays at twilight.
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