Aladdin's Lamp
How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World
Aladdin’s Lamp is the fascinating story of how ancient Greek philosophy and science began in the sixth century B.C. and, during the next millennium, spread across the Greco-Roman world, producing the remarkable discoveries and theories of Thales, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Galen, Ptolemy, and many others. John Freely explains how, as the Dark Ages shrouded Europe, scholars in medieval Baghdad translated the works of these Greek thinkers into Arabic, spreading their ideas throughout the Islamic world from Central Asia to Spain, with many Muslim scientists, most notably Avicenna, Alhazen, and Averroës, adding their own interpretations to the philosophy and science they had inherited. Freely goes on to show how, beginning in the twelfth century, these texts by Islamic…
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March 9, 2010John Freely was born in Brooklyn in 1926, served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1946, graduated from Iona College, received a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from New York University, and did postdoctoral work at All Souls College, Oxford, England. He taught physics for more than fifty years at Bosphorus University—formerly Robert College—in Istanbul, where a building was recently named for him. He is the author of more than sixty books on Turkey, Greece, biographical figures, and the history of science. Freely died in 2017.