• Ibn al-Natis, a Syrian from the late 13th century, is credited with giving the first correct description of blood circulation in the body, 400 years before the work of Thomas Harvey.
• The Polish astronomer Copernicus (1473-1543) has Arabic astronomers to thank for his calculations: indeed, there are diagrams in his books that appear to have been lifted exactly from the work of the Arab astronomer Ibn Shatir 100 years earlier.
• The modern scientific method, based on observation and measurement, is often said to have been established in the 17th century by Francis Bacon and René Descartes. But the Iraqi-born physicist Ibn al-Haythem (Alhazen), had the same idea in the 10th century.
• The word "alchemy" derives from the Arabic "alkimya", which means "chemistry". The world's first true chemist was a Yemeni Arab by the name of Jabir ibn Hayyan, born in 721.
• Al-Razi (Rhazes) was the greatest clinician of the Middle Ages. Born near Teheran in 865, he ran a psychiatric ward in Baghdad at a time when, in the Christian world, the mentally ill would have been regarded as being possessed by the devil.
• The word "algebra" comes from the Arabic "al-jebr", and was made famous by the great ninth-century mathematician al-Khwarizmi. But contrary to popular myth, algebra was not an Islamic invention - its rules actually go back to the Greek mathematician Diophantus.
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