ISLAM AND JUDAISM CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE WORLD

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[besieged]

ARAB/ISLAMIC NOBEL WINNERS
19.6% of World's Population.....2 billion

Literature
1957 - Albert Camus
1988 - Najib Mahfooz 1988.

Peace
1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
1994 - Yaser Arafat

Chemistry
1990 - Elias James Corey
1999 - Ahmed Zewail

Medicine
1960 - Peter Brian Medawar
1998 - Ferid Mourad

JEWISH NOBEL WINNERS
0.2% OF WORLD'S POPULATION............14.1 Million Jews

Literature
1910 - Paul Heyse
1927 - Henri Bergson
1958 - Boris Pasternak
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 - Nelly Sachs
1976 - Saul Bellow
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 - Elias Canetti
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1991 - Nadine Gordimer

World Peace
1911 - Alfred Fried
1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser
1968 - Rene Cassin
1973 - Henry Kissinger
1978 - Menachem Begin
1986 - Elie Wiesel
1994 - Shimon Peres
1994 - Yitzhak Rabin

Chemistry
1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 - Henri Moissan
1910 - Otto Wallach
1915 - Richard Willstaetter
1918 - Fritz Haber
1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
1961 - Melvin Calvin
1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
1972 - William Howard Stein
1977 - Ilya Prigogine
1979 - Herbert Charles Brown
1980 - Paul Berg
1980 - Walter Gilbert
1981 - Roald Hoffmann
1982 - Aaron Klug
1985 - Albert A. Hauptman
1985 - Jerome Karle
1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
1988 - Robert Huber
1989 - Sidney Altman
1992 - Rudolph Marcus
2000 - Alan J. Heeger

Economics
1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 - Simon Kuznets
1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
1976 - Milton Friedman
1978 - Herbert A. Simon
1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 - Franco Modigliani
1987 - Robert M. Solow
1990 - Harry Markowitz
1990 - Merton Miller
1992 - Gary Becker
1993 - Rober Fogel

Medicine
1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
1908 - Paul Erlich
1914 - Robert Barany
1922 - Otto Meyerhof
1930 - Karl Landsteiner
1931 - Otto Warburg
1936 - Otto Loewi
1944 - Joseph Erlanger
1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser
1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman
1953 - Hans Krebs
1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958 - Joshua Lederberg
1959 - Arthur Kornberg
1964 - Konrad Bloch
1965 - Francois Jacob
1965 - Andre Lwoff
1967 - George Wald
1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969 - Salvador Luria
1970 - Julius Axelrod
1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman
1975 - David Baltimore
1975 - Howard Martin Temin
1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
1977 - Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
1978 - Daniel Nathans
1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
1984 - Cesar Milstein
1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
1988 - Gertrude Elion
1989 - Harold Varmus
1991 - Erwin Neher
1991 - Bert Sakmann
1993 - Richard J. Roberts
1993 - Phillip Sharp
1994 - Alfred Gilman
1995 - Edward B. Lewis

Physics
1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
1921 - Albert Einstein
1922 - Niels Bohr
1925 - James Franck
1925 - Gustav Hertz
1943 - Gustav Stern
1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
1952 - Felix Bloch
1954 - Max Born
1958 - Igor Tamm
1959 - Emilio Segre
1960 - Donald A. Glaser
1961 - Robert Hofstadter
1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
1965 - Julian Schwinger
1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
1971 - Dennis Gabor
1973 - Brian David Josephson
1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
1976 - Burton Richter
1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
1978 - Peter L Kapitza
1979 - Stephen Weinberg
1979 - Sheldon Glashow
1988 - Leon Lederman
1988 - Melvin Schwartz
1988 - Jack Steinberger
1990 - Jerome Friedman
1995 - Martin Perl

(Population Info:
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, Ill., Britannica Book of the Year, 1999)

[Blood of Tyrants]

I can't verify except to concur. The Arabs once were very advanced in mathmatics. The base 10 counting system was an Arabic invention, which we still use today.

[medved]

But then something happened to the great Islamic civilization, and make no mistake, it was the most advanced on earth at the time. A lot of the destruction took place in present day Iran and Iraq and was done by the Mongol Hordes.

Burning the beards off four of Chengis Khan's ambassadors and sending them back to Chengis Khan like that to show Chengis Khan what bad people they were is not what I would call a sign of superior intelligence or anything like that; I mean, if you had to pick the last, and I mean the very last guy who ever lived that you'd ever want to #&$@ with.....

[winner45]

All Religons are false. They are nothing more than fantasies intended to prop up the weak willed or simple minded.

[TomSmedley]

If the Arabic peoples are not out there winning secular awards, maybe it's because they are more interested in spiritual endeavors.

Like

• Shooting 5 year-old children in their beds
• Blowing up restaurants
• Wholesale slaughter of innocents
• Mutilating girls
• Hijacking airliners
• Murdering olympic athletes
• Brainwashing their own children to become sociopathic killers
• Resenting civilized peoples

OK, did I miss any spiritual activities characteristic of Islam?

[Gaston]

Looked up Snell's law but in the many many pages on this subject not one mentioned anything about Arabs.

[RightWhale]

Snell's Law: n1*sin(theta1) = n2*sin(theta2)

N is the index of refraction of the medium, theta is the angle of the light ray in the medium. This was used to calculate the surfaces of "burning lenses."

[ecomcon]

"It should be noted that the Arabic numerals were neither invented by nor used by the Arabs. They were developed in India by the Hindus around 600 AD. Interestingly, these numbers were written "backwards", thus one hundred twenty three was written 321.

Around 750 AD this system of decimal arithmetic was brought to Persia when several important Hindu works were translated into Arabic.

The noted Arab mathematician al-Khwârizmî (Muhammad b. Musa al-Khwârizmî ca. 875) wrote a textbook on the subject which now exists only in a number of Latin versions. In these a point is used for zero.

In ca. 952 Abu'l-Hasan-al-Uqlidisi wrote the Book of the parts of Indian Arithmetic which contains an explanation and application of decimal fractions. [Hassan and Hill 1986 p 24] In the transmission of Arabic numerals to Europe the method of writing numbers became reversed to the present method in the process." [Knuth 1981 p 181]

[Salgak]

Yes, we've seen plenty of those spiritual endeavors on the streets of Jerusalem and elsewhere. I'd suggest if they want to see Allah, that they do so by themselves, and not take innocents with them.

A long time ago, Islam had a flourishing and scholarly culture. Then the fundamentalists took over, a thousand or so years ago, and Islamic culture has stagnated ever since. About that time, Europe pulled itself out of the Dark Ages, and the West has left Islam in the dust ever since. They know it, and they resent it. . . .

[Surge-on]

All Religons are false. They are nothing more than fantasies intended to prop up the weak willed or simple minded.

Well, you sound like a "loser" to me, but that must be left for another day and another discussion.

[RightWhale]

not one mentioned anything about Arabs

Funny thing, isn't it? Some of the most famous scientists of the Renaissance were Arabic speaking Arabs whose names were Romanized for one reason or another.

[TheHeterodoxConservative]

And "algorithm," named not after a blowhard no-nothing vice-president, but the famous 8th-9th century mathematician "Al-Khowarizmi."

Here's a really nice site dedicated to the history of mathematics.

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/BiogIndex.html

Click on the "500-1499 a.d." link and you'll see a boatload of Arabs.

[babygene]

"The base 10 counting system was an Arabic invention, which we still use today."

Most counting today is done in base 2.

[Surge-on]

OK, did I miss any spiritual activities characteristic of Islam?

I think that you have pegged just about right, Tom!

[lodwick]

bttt

[Wm Bach]

maybe it's because they are more interested in spiritual endeavors.

Nah...not so much spiritual as in just in blowing things up and hating everyone for being so much better.

[elmer fudd]

Intelligence is a great gift and the Jews are blessed with it, but just being smart doesn't necessarily make you morally right.

Fritz Haber is one of the Jews on that list. He won the Nobel prize for chemistry for his invention of electrolysis of water and then turned his attentions to developing poison gasses for the Kaiser. Ironically the man who invented modern chemical warfare was himself gassed in the holocaust.

One could bring up other Jews that were also brilliant and brought the world nothing but suffering like Lenin and Trotsky.

I'm not trying to imply that Jews are evil geniuses, (they have contributed greatly to mankind), just stating that you can't equate someones humanity with their intelligence.

[Gaston]

The Development of Algebra

The Hindus and Arabs

After the decline of the Roman Empire (not that the Romans did anything for maths!) India became the temporary centre of mathematical research. The most important contributions of the Hindus in the second half of the first millenium were the decimal place system, the introduction of zero and negative numbers, and the development of algebra. Whereas Diophantus' first step in the solution of a linear equation was to remove the negative terms, the Hindus worked with negative numbers from about 600 A.D. A number was turned into the corresponding negative quantity by placing a dot over it. They also had a method for representing positive and negative numbers pictorially by line segments in different directions, corresponding to our representation using a number line. In their treatment of equations in several unknowns, the Hindus also achieved some advance on Diophantus, in that they actually worked with several unknowns using different colours to distinguish them. Thus the second unknown was called "the black one", the third "The blue one", etc. Since they allowed negative numbers in their solution of quadratic equations, they could combine the various cases considered by Diophantus into one rule, and had a method of solution similar to our formula for quadratics today. The Hindus were the first to show an awareness of the fact that roots occur in pairs, and occasionally even admitted negative roots as solutions. The Arabs took over the preparatory work done by the Greeks and Hindus in algebra. Their most important algebraist was al-Khowarizmi (9th century - his name is commemorated in the word "algorithm"). His major work is entitled "Al-jabr wa'lmugabalah" (restoration and balancing) and from the first word in this title we now have the word "algebra". However his algebra was a rhetorical algebra which, unlike the work of Diophantus, did not use symbols for particular arithmetical operations.