Bücher von Ibn al-Haytham

Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–c. 1040), known in Europe as Alhazen, was born in Basra and went to Cairo to serve the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, who wanted to control the floods of the Nile. According to a famous story, when he realised the project was impossible, he pretended to be mad to escape the caliph's anger, and used his years of confinement to study.

His Book of Optics showed through careful experiments that we see because light enters the eye, and described the camera obscura. Translated into Latin, it influenced European science for centuries, down to Kepler and Newton, and his insistence on testing ideas by experiment makes him one of the founders of scientific method.