The Iranian Islamic astronomer, mathematician, and historian of science, as-Saghani al-Asturlabi

Compiled by: Syed Ali Shahbaz
On 8th of the Islamic month of Zil-Qa’dah in 379 AH, the Iranian Islamic astronomer, mathematician, and historian of science, Abu Hamed Ahmad Ibn Mohammed as-Saghani al-Asturlabi, passed away in Baghdad, where he lived most of his life. He was from the town of Saghan in Khorasan near the city of Merv, which is presently in Turkmenistan.
As is evident from his last surname ‘al-Asturlabi’, he was the maker of astrolabes and invented many other instruments, while working in Sharaf od-Dowla's observatory. He worked on the trisection of the angle. He wrote some of the earliest comments on the history of science. These included comparison between the "ancients" that is, the Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks and Indians, and the "modern scholars", that is, the Muslim scientists of his time.