1/26/24
Statue of Abu Rayhan Muhammad Biruni from the Embassy of Uzbekistan

Abu Rayhan Muhammad Biruni 973-1048 AD
Biruni, born in western Uzbekistan, was a Renaissance genius five centuries before the European Renaissance. A deep-dyed polymath, he founded the field of mineralogy, mapped the known world more precisely than anyone before him, and made lasting contributions to mathematics, cultural anthropology, and geodesy. Little known in the Western world until recently, Biruni measured the earth more accurately than anyone down to the sixteenth century and hypothesized the existence of North and South America as inhabited continents.