Speaker: Ehsan Masood

Event Details
A working doctor at the age of 16. A Hafiz. A physicist and mathematician. A philosopher and counsellor to kings and caliphs. The 10th century central Asian polymath Ibn Sina (Avicenna) is by any standard one of history's most remarkable individuals. From some 250 books, papers and letters we now know that he was one of the first to describe experiments in distillation and that we worked out the formula for momentum as the product of mass and velocity. But Ibn Sina is best known for his works in medicine, for thinking about the mind-body relationship and for writing one of the world's most influential medical texts: The Canon of Medicine. Originally in five volumes it was written sometime between 1000 and 1037, and eventually found its way into the universities, surgeries and pharmacies of Western Europe, where it dominated medical publishing for 500 years. Yet while Ibn Sina may well have been a candidate for several Nobel prizes, 1000 years ago both the Islamic East and the Latin West found reasons to declare him to be both genius and heretic. Ehsan Masood will describe the life and legacy of someone's whose curiosity took him to the furthest reaches of the known world.

Ehsan Masood is a science journalist based in London and author of 'Science and Islam: a history', which was written to accompany a BBC television and radio series on the history of science during the Islamic empires. He also writes for Nature and Prospect magazines and teaches international science policy at Imperial College London.