Al-Kindi

Abu Yusuf Ya'qub ibn Ishaq al-Sabbah al-Kindi, who lived from around 801 to 873 AD, was an Arab polymath active as a philosopher, mathematician, physician and music theorist, the first of the Islamic peripatetic philosophers and hailed as the father of Arab philosophy. Born in Kufa and educated in Baghdad, he became a prominent figure in the House of Wisdom, an institute of translation and learning patronized by the Abbasid caliphs, who appointed him to oversee the translation of Greek scientific and philosophical texts into Arabic; this contact with Hellenistic philosophy had a profound effect on him, and he synthesized, adapted and promoted Hellenistic and Peripatetic philosophy in the Muslim world, subsequently writing hundreds of original treatises on subjects from metaphysics, ethics, logic and psychology to medicine, pharmacology, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, optics and more practical topics such as perfumes, swords, jewels, glass, dyes, zoology, tides, mirrors, meteorology and earthquakes. In mathematics he played an important role in introducing Hindu-Arabic numerals to the Islamic world alongside al-Khwarizmi, and he is considered one of the fathers of cryptography, his book on deciphering cryptographic messages giving rise to cryptanalysis, the earliest known use of statistical inference, and the technique of frequency analysis. The central theme of his philosophical writings is the compatibility of philosophy with orthodox Islamic sciences, particularly theology, and many of his works address subjects such as the nature of God, the soul and prophetic knowledge.