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Image: Nasir al-Din al-Tusi at the observatory in Maragha, Persia.
Source: The British Library, Public domain.
al-Tusi (1201 - 1274)
Also known as Nasir al-Din Tusi

Places: Nishapur

Nasir al-Din Tusi was among the greatest scholars of the thirteenth century. A native of Tus in Khorasan, he was educated in Nishapur and spent much of his career there. Al-Tusi was a consummate polymath, founder of the Maragha observatory in modern Azerbaijian, and is widely considered the founder of trigonometry as an independent discipline. He challenged Aristotle’s notion that all motion is either linear or circular, and Ptolemy's assertion that the earth did not rotate. Three hundred years before Galileo, Al-Tusi described the Milky Way as a belt of distant stars.