Ibn Bajjah

Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Yahya ibn as-Sa'igh at-Tujibi ibn Bajja, known simply as Ibn Bajja or by his Latinized name Avempace, lived circa 1085 to 1138 and was an Arab polymath whose writings covered astronomy, physics and music as well as philosophy, medicine, botany and poetry; he authored the Kitab an-Nabat, the Book of Plants, a popular work on botany that defined the sex of plants, and his philosophical theories influenced the work of Ibn Rushd, known as Averroes, and Albertus Magnus. Most of his writings were left incomplete or poorly organized due to his early death, and his main contribution to Islamic philosophy was his idea on the phenomenology of the soul, which was itself never completed; he wrote one of the first commentaries on Aristotle in the Western world, and though his work on projectile motion was never translated from Arabic to Latin, his views on it became well known to Western philosophers, astronomers and scientists and are found in the text known as Text 71, later influencing Galileo Galilei. His theories in astronomy and physics were preserved respectively by Moses Maimonides and Averroes after most of his own writings were lost, and his diwan, a collection of his poetry, was rediscovered only in 1951.