A starry sky with the Milky Way galaxy(thanks to Bernd Nies) Early astronomy The very earliest people, as early as six million years ago, knew much more about the moon and the planets and the stars than most people do today. That's because they lived mainly outside, without electric lights blocking out the sky, and they saw every night how the moon and [...]
Copernicus, a Renaissance astronomer Starting in the 1200s AD, as Europe got richer, great universities got started there. In the later Middle Ages, West Asia and India suffered from the Mongol invasions. West Asian people were too poor to send their children to the old university at Baghdad. In the 1300s, the Black Death killed so many people in Egypt that the old university at Cairo also didn't have [...]
Islamic astronomers taking observations West Asian astronomers had been world leaders in astronomy for thousands of years before the Islamic conquests in the 600s AD. In the last centuries BC, West Asian astronomers had already figured out that the earth was a ball, and that the earth went around the sun, and how big the earth was, and that the moon went [...]
Al Tusi in his observatory (ca. 1259 AD) Nasir al Tusi was born in Iran in 1201 AD, as the Seljuk Empire was falling apart. The Seljuks were Turkic people. But al Tusi, like most of the people living near him, was of Iranian descent. He spoke Persian at home. He was from a Shiite, Sufi family. Al Tusi's father died when he [...]
History of Math: Counting tokens from Mehrgarh in Late Stone Age India Indian counting tokens and base 10 The first Indian numbers appeared in the late Stone Age, about 4000 BC. Around this time, people at Mehrgarh began to use counting tokens. (People were already using these tokens in West Asia.) Where was Mehrgahr? Indian history articles Writing [...]
Ancient Indian science: Mohenjo Daro (ca. 2000 BC) From the time of the Harappans to the time of the Islamic conquests, Indian scientists and mathematicians were leaders. Ancient Indian science especially stood out in mathematics and engineering. Invention of zero History of steel Ancient India articles Harappan science and math in India The Harappans in 2500 BC had a sewage system at their [...]
Making a sundial in your yard You'll need to do this project on a sunny day. Get a wooden stick, about a meter long, and put it in a place that will be sunny all day, like a south-facing windowsill or the middle of your yard. At the midpoint of the wooden stick, [...]
Nalanda University, Patna, India Arya Bhata was born about 476 AD in India. He probably came from central India, though nobody knows for sure. When Arya Bhata was a teenager, he left his hometown. He traveled to Kusumapura (modern Patna) in north-eastern India, on the banks of the Ganges river, to study at Nalanda university. At this [...]
