Al-Kindi

Al-Kindi, c. 801 to 873 AD, was a Mesopotamian Arab polymath who worked as a philosopher, mathematician, physician and music theorist, and is called the father of Arab philosophy. Born in Kufa into an aristocratic family of the Kinda tribe and educated in Baghdad, he rose to prominence at the House of Wisdom, where Abbasid caliphs put him in charge of translating Greek scientific and philosophical texts into Arabic. Bibliographers credit him with at least two hundred and sixty books, including thirty-two on geometry. In mathematics he helped bring Hindu-Arabic numerals to the Islamic world, and his Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages is counted as a founding text of cryptanalysis, introducing frequency analysis for breaking ciphers. His most famous work, On First Philosophy, was dedicated to the caliph al-Mutasim, whose son he tutored. He lost favour under later caliphs, and most of his writings were afterwards lost or survived only in Latin translations by Gerard of Cremona.