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The Most Famous

ENGINEERS from Iraq

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This page contains a list of the greatest Iraqi Engineers. The pantheon dataset contains 323 Engineers, 1 of which were born in Iraq. This makes Iraq the birth place of the 31st most number of Engineers behind Indonesia and Panama.

Top 1

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Iraqi Engineers of all time. This list of famous Iraqi Engineers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

Photo of Banū Mūsā

1. Banū Mūsā (900 - 873)

With an HPI of 60.50, Banū Mūsā is the most famous Iraqi Engineer.  His biography has been translated into 27 different languages on wikipedia.

The three brothers Abū Jaʿfar, Muḥammad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir (before 803 – February 873); Abū al‐Qāsim, Aḥmad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir (d. 9th century) and Al-Ḥasan ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir (d. 9th century), were Persian scholars who lived and worked in Baghdad. They are collectively known as the Banū Mūsā (Arabic: بنو موسی, "Sons of Mūsā (or Moses)"). The Banū Mūsā were the sons of Mūsā ibn Shākir, who was a well-known Astronomer of al-Ma'mun, a son of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid. After their father's death, the brothers received an education under al-Ma'mun’s direction, and were enrolled at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. There they undertook the translation of ancient Greek works acquired from Byzantium, which they used to develop their own technological, mathematical and astronomical ideas. They were some of the earliest scholars to adopt Greek mathematics, but innovative in their approach to the concepts of area and circumference by expressing them using numerical values instead of ratios. They made geodesic measurements to determine the length of a degree of latitude, and so obtained a relatively accurate value for the circumference of the Earth. The Banū Mūsā wrote almost 20 books, all but three of which are now lost. The most important of all their works was a treatise on geometry, Kitāb Maʿrifah masāḥat al-ashkāl al-basīṭah wa-al-kuriyyah ("Book on the Measurement of Plane and Spherical Figures"), which was used extensively by medieval mathematicians. Their most famous extant work (of which the oldest and most reliable copy is in the Topkapi Sarayi in Istanbul) is Kitab al-Hiyal al-Naficah ("Book of Ingenious Devices"). It describes 100 inventions, many of which were pouring vessels, intended to entertain party guests. Some of their innovations, such as those that involved fluid pressure variations and valves, remained unsurpassed until the modern period. One of those inventions includes an automatic flute player that may have been the first programmable machine or computer.

Pantheon has 1 people classified as engineers born between 900 and 900. Of these 1, none of them are still alive today. The most famous deceased engineers include Banū Mūsā.

Deceased Engineers

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