As the Islamic empire flourished, many Muslim intellectuals began to contemplate and eventually advance an indispensable academic field that is now taken for granted: mathematics.
The caliph Harun al-Rashid first sparked an interest in mathematics when his reign began in 786 A.D. by encouraging the knowledgeable mathematicians and scientists of the time to relinquish the then-forgotten works of famous Greek scholars such as Euclid, Archimedes, and Ptolemy and begin studying and translating them. As the Greeks had originally laid down the foundation for modern mathematics with their work in geometry, the advent of newly-translated Greek works undoubtedly encouraged scholars to explore [...]

The roads wound all over the empire. Foreign goods were abundant in markets. The minds of the people were alive, buzzing with innovations and ideas. While the rest of the world was vanquished by intellectual darkness, the Islamic Empire was alive and teeming with knowledge and discovery, creating one of the greatest eras in history.
Mathematicians improved upon works of the early Greeks, scientists experimented with new discoveries, astrologists perfected the science of the lunar calendar, and map-makers made the most accurate maps to be found. Even ordinary merchants and sailors helped give rise to this “Golden Age”: through their travels, [...]

The Abbasid Caliphate (750 C.E. – 1528 C.E.) is not only known as the third of the Caliphates in the Islamic Empire, but as one of the most influential and educative periods in history. It was a golden time marked by incredible advancements in the sciences and arts, advancements that were probably never deemed possible. It was once stated that, “Arab Muslims now studied astronomy, alchemy, medicine and mathematics with such success that, during the ninth and tenth centuries, more scientific discoveries had been achieved in the Abbasid empire than in any previous period of history.”1 In fact, it was [...]