Taqi al-Din

Taqi al-Din Muhammad ibn Ma'ruf was an Ottoman polymath, born in Damascus in 1526 and active across astronomy, mathematics, mechanics and optics until his death in 1585. In 1574 Sultan Murad III commissioned him to build the Constantinople Observatory in Istanbul, one of the largest observatories in the Islamic world, completed in 1579 and demolished in 1580 amid political conflict; his coordinate measurements there were reportedly more precise than those of his contemporaries Tycho Brahe and Nicolaus Copernicus. He also built mechanical astronomical clocks with dials for hours, minutes and seconds, and in 1551 he described a self-rotating spit driven by the flow of steam escaping a boiler, an early description relevant to the later history of the steam turbine. He is credited with authoring more than ninety works in his lifetime.