Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham was a medieval mathematician, astronomer, and physicist of the Islamic Golden Age from present-day Iraq. Referred to as "the father of modern optics", he made significant contributions to the principles of optics and visual perception in particular. His most influential work is titled Kitāb al-Manāẓir, written during 1011–1021, which survived in a Latin edition. The works of Alhazen were frequently cited during the scientific revolution by Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Christiaan Huygens, and Galileo Galilei.
Barcelona is a city on the northeastern coast of Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second-most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within city limits, its urban area extends to numerous neighbouring municipalities within the province of Barcelona and is home to around 4.8 million people, making it the fifth most populous urban area in the European Union after Paris, the Ruhr area, Madrid and Milan. It is one of the largest metropolises on the Mediterranean Sea, located on the coast between the mouths of the rivers Llobregat and Besòs, bounded to the west by the Serra de Collserola mountain range.
François d'Aguilon was a Jesuit, mathematician, physicist, and architect from the Spanish Netherlands.
Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music. He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books Astronomia nova, Harmonice Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae, influencing among others Isaac Newton, providing one of the foundations for his theory of universal gravitation. The variety and impact of his work made Kepler one of the founders and fathers of modern astronomy, the scientific method, natural and modern science. He has been described as the "father of science fiction" for his novel Somnium.
Claudius Ptolemy was an Alexandrian mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were important to later Byzantine, Islamic, and Western European science. The first was his astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest, originally entitled Mathematical Treatise. The second is the Geography, which is a thorough discussion on maps and the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. The third is the astrological treatise in which he attempted to adapt horoscopic astrology to the Aristotelian natural philosophy of his day. This is sometimes known as the Apotelesmatika but more commonly known as the Tetrábiblos, from the Koine Greek meaning "Four Books", or by its Latin equivalent Quadripartite.
Christiaan Huygens, Lord of Zeelhem, was a Dutch mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor who is regarded as a key figure in the Scientific Revolution. In physics, Huygens made seminal contributions to optics and mechanics, while as an astronomer he studied the rings of Saturn and discovered its largest moon, Titan. As an engineer and inventor, he improved the design of telescopes and invented the pendulum clock, the most accurate timekeeper for almost 300 years. A talented mathematician and physicist, his works contain the first idealization of a physical problem by a set of mathematical parameters, and the first mathematical and mechanistic explanation of an unobservable physical phenomenon.
James Gregory was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer. His surname is sometimes spelt as Gregorie, the original Scottish spelling. He described an early practical design for the reflecting telescope – the Gregorian telescope – and made advances in trigonometry, discovering infinite series representations for several trigonometric functions.
Esteban Terrades i Illa also known as Esteve Terradas, was a Spanish mathematician, scientist and engineer. He researched and taught widely in the fields of mathematics and the physical sciences, working not only in his native Catalonia, but also in the rest of Spain and in South America. He was also active as a consultant in the Spanish aeronautics, electric power, telephone and railway industries.
Alexandre Deulofeu i Torres was a Catalan politician and philosopher of history. He wrote about what he called the Mathematics of History, a cyclical theory on the evolution of civilizations.
Optics began with the development of lenses by the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, followed by theories on light and vision developed by ancient Greek philosophers, and the development of geometrical optics in the Greco-Roman world. The word optics is derived from the Greek term τα ὀπτικά meaning 'appearance, look'. Optics was significantly reformed by the developments in the medieval Islamic world, such as the beginnings of physical and physiological optics, and then significantly advanced in early modern Europe, where diffractive optics began. These earlier studies on optics are now known as "classical optics". The term "modern optics" refers to areas of optical research that largely developed in the 20th century, such as wave optics and quantum optics.
Nico Felicien Declercq is a physicist and mechanical engineer. He is a professor with the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and Georgia Tech Europe in France. He is specialized in ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation of materials, propagation of ultrasonic waves in highly complex materials, in acoustics, in theoretical and experimental linear and nonlinear ultrasonics, acousto-optics, Medical Physics and Acoustic Microscopy. He has investigated the acoustics of Chichen Itza and Epidaurus. He published over 100 works in scientific journals. As a Ph.D. student, Declercq published 30 peer-reviewed articles in reputed scientific journals, including Annalen der Physik, and made 42 presentations at international congresses in his field. His work was highlighted in Nature News, New Scientist, USA Today, The Economist, The Washington Post, Die Zeit, and Acoustics Today.
The natural sciences saw various advancements during the Golden Age of Islam, adding a number of innovations to the Transmission of the Classics. During this period, Islamic theology was encouraging of thinkers to find knowledge. Thinkers from this period included Al-Farabi, Abu Bishr Matta, Ibn Sina, al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham and Ibn Bajjah. These works and the important commentaries on them were the wellspring of science during the medieval period. They were translated into Arabic, the lingua franca of this period.
Julio Rey Pastor was a Spanish mathematician and historian of science.
Marta Sanz-Solé is a Spanish mathematician specializing in probability theory. She obtained her PhD in 1978 from the University of Barcelona under the supervision of David Nualart.
The Chronicle of Ramon Muntaner, written by the Catalan burgher and administrator Ramon Muntaner in Xirivella, Kingdom of Valencia, in 1325–1328, is the longest in the series of four "great" Catalan-language chronicles of the 13th and 14th centuries. It narrates events relating to the history of the Crown of Aragon and to Muntaner's personal career in Iberia, Sicily, the Aegean and North Africa and spans the period from the conception of James I of Aragon in May 1207 to the coronation of Alfonso IV of Aragon in April 1328. Its character of "mirror of princes" and "mirror of citizens" has been pointed out by scholars.
Eva Miranda Galcerán is a Spanish mathematician specializing in dynamical systems, especially in symplectic geometry. Her research includes work with Victor Guillemin on the mathematics underlying the three-body problem in celestial mechanics.
Pilar Bayer Isant is a Spanish mathematician specializing in number theory. She is a professor emerita in the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Barcelona.
Umberto Bottazzini is an Italian historian of mathematics, writing on the history of mathematics and the foundations of mathematics.
Judith Veronica Field is a British historian of science with interests in mathematics and the impact of science in art, an honorary visiting research fellow in the Department of History of Art of Birkbeck, University of London, former president of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, and president of the Leonardo da Vinci Society.
Juan Felipe Cucker Farkas is an Uruguayan mathematician and theoretical computer scientist who has done research into the complexity theory of the Blum–Shub–Smale computational model and the complexity of numerical algorithms in linear programming and numerical algebraic geometry.
