Author: Karen K. Christensen-Dalsgaard, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, MacEwan University

The medieval Islamic mathematician, astronomer and physicist Ibn al Haytham (965 – c. 1040) lived in Cairo, Egypt, during the Islamic golden Age and is considered the father of optics. (Wikimedia Commons), CC BY In the 11th century in Cairo, the foundations for modern science were laid through the detention of an innocent man. The mathematician Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham had been tasked with regulating the flow of the Nile, but when he saw the river that had shaped 4,000 years of human civilization, the hubris of the task became all too obvious. To avoid the wrath of the Fatimid…