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Millennium Essay

Nature 404, 227 (16 March 2000) | doi:10.1038/35005178

A 1,000-year chain of thinkers

Giovanni F. Bignami1

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...Kant is connected to Abel, Abel's connected to Maxwell ...

Science, and indeed thought, at the dawn of the second Christian millennium blossomed in the Arabic world. Abdulla ibn Sina (980–1037) — known to the west as Avicenna — opens the millennium with his first philosophical work in 1001.