Ibn al-Haytham dies in Cairo

1039

The Basran mathematician and physicist died in his Fatimid house at about seventy-five years old. His Book of Optics, rigorously experimental, would be translated into Latin in the twelfth century and shape the understanding of vision and refraction from Roger Bacon to Kepler four centuries later. His insistence on verifiable experiment over inherited authority made him a forerunner of the scientific method itself.