The Renaissance is seen as the beginning of the rapid development of human thought. In all areas, the Europeans were able to impact all subjects of study and from the Scientific Revolution, propelled western civilizations into the now modern world. What is least recognized is the Islamic world’s contribution to Renaissance thinkers in many of the subjects they progressed in. Most notably in the area of mathematics, Islamic mathematicians helped make possible the astounding discoveries by well-known geniuses like Galileo Galilei, Leonardo Fibonacci, Leonardo da Vinci, and Isaac Newton. The lesser known Islamic mathematicians whose names seemed to have faded from European history books are al-Khwārizmī, al-Haytham, Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, Omar Khayyam and countless more. A sad reality is that the Western world sees the origin of many subjects starting in the Renaissance or from the Golden Age of Greece/Rome but what is completely glanced over are the intellectual advancements made …show more content…
Many of these Greek books no longer exist in the original Greek but were luckily were preserved throughout the medieval period because of the Arabic translations. With the Renaissance being the revival of Greek and Roman sciences, it is instrumental that the Arabs were able to sustain the knowledge that they provided. The reason for the Islamic world’s interest with Greek geometry lies in the fact that it had many practical uses. Geometry could be used for astronomy, time-keeping, architecture, geography and technological inventions like the astrolabe. The famous philosopher Al-Farabi wrote A Book of Spiritual Crafts and Natural Secrets in the Details of Geometrical Figures, which influenced Abu’l-Wafa’s work On Those Parts of Geometry Needed by Craftsmen that summarized the practical uses of