Taqi ad-Din was an Ottoman Turkish scientist, astronomer, engineer and inventor, physicist and mathematician, botanist and zoologist, pharmacist and physician, judge and philosopher, and madrasah teacher. He was the author of more than 90 books on a wide variety of subjects.
Background
Ethnicity:
His ethnicity has been described as Ottoman Arab, Ottoman Turkish and Syrian.
Taqi al-Din Muhammad ibn Ma'ruf ash-Shami al-Asadi was born in 1526 in Damascus, then Ottoman Empire, nowadays Syrian Arab Republic. He was the son of Maʿruf Efendi.
Education
Taqi ad-Din was educated in theology and the rational sciences in Damascus and Cairo. It is probable that Taqī al-Dīn's teacher in mathematics was Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ghāzzī while the one in astronomy was Muhammad b. Abī al-Fath al-Sūfī.
Career
Ad-Din taught at several madaris, served as a judge in Palestine, Damascus, and Cairo, at the same time creating work in astronomy and mathematic.
Taqī al-Dīn came to Istanbul in 1570. In 1571 he became chief astronomer to the Sultan.
Until 1577 Ad-Din continued his studies at the Galata Tower, an observatory built on his suggestion by Murad III. The observatory was made of two separate buildings and contained a library that held books which covered astronomy and mathematics. This observatory would become one of the largest ones in the Islamic world. The observatory was completed in 1579, but was destroyed in a year due to political problems.
Working at the Galata Tower, together with the staff of sixteen people, Ad-Din created new answers to astronomical problems, such as trigonometric tables based on decimal fractions. He also used a variety of previously created instruments and techniques, as well as those he developed himself, to aid in his work at the observatory. Of these novel inventions, the automatic-mechanical clock is regarded as one of the most important developed in the Istanbul Observatory. Non less famous his invention of a six-cylinder 'Monobloc' pump in 1559 and his book on optics and the behavior of light, called Takîyüddîn'in Optik Kitabi or Taqī al-Dīn's Book of Optics.
Besides a great number of books on astronomy, Taqi ad-Din also composed a book on medicine and zoology, three on physics-mechanics and five on mathematics.
Views
Taqī al‐Dīn was a successor to the great school of Samarqand and, following the lead of ʿAlī Qūshjī, tended toward a more purely mathematical approach in his scientific work that was beginning to abandon Aristotelian physics and metaphysics.