How Muslim Scientists Shaped the Modern World 1,000 Years Ago - Nancy Marie Brown (English)

<p><a href="https://theclearevidence.org/">The Clear Evidence</a></p> <h2>The Scientist Pope – Nancy Marie Brown</h2> <p>I was introduced to The Scientist Pope through an act of grace. Writing a book about an adventurous Viking woman, I made an imaginary pilgrimage to Rome just after the year 1000. Wondering which pope Gudrid the Far-Traveler may have met, I discovered Gerbert of Aurillac, who served as Pope Sylvester II from 999 to 1003.</p> <p>I was astonished. Nothing in my years of reading about the Middle Ages had led me to suspect that the pope in the year 1000 was the leading mathematician and astronomer of his day.</p> <p>Nor was his science just a sidelight. According to a chronicler who knew him, he rose from humble beginnings to the highest office in the Christian Church “on account of his scientific knowledge.”</p> <p>I felt as if I had stumbled into a parallel universe, an alternate history of the Middle Ages. So I began writing another book, to share the story of The Scientist Pope.</p> <p>A professor at a cathedral school in France for most of his career, Gerbert of Aurillac was the first Christian known to teach math using Arabic numerals.</p> <p>He devised an abacus, or counting board, that mimics the algorithms we use today for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. It has been called the first computer.</p> <p>Gerbert made sighting tubes to observe the stars and constructed globes on which their positions were recorded relative to lines of celestial longitude and latitude.</p> <p>He (or perhaps his best student) wrote a handbook on the astrolabe, an instrument for telling time and making measurements by the sun or stars. You could even use it to calculate the circumference of the earth, which Gerbert knew very well was not flat like a disc but round like an apple.</p> <p>All of this science Gerbert learned as a youth living on the border of Islamic Spain—then an extraordinarily tolerant culture in which learning was prized.</p> <p>In the caliph’s library in Cordoba were 40,000 books; G