The Scientist King

 

The westernmost of the three madrassas in Registon Square is called Ulugh Beg Madrassa.  

(A madrassa is, essentially, a university or academy of learning.)

This beauty was named after its founder, Ulugh Beg.  This guy was honestly pretty awesome.  He was the grandson of Timur (/Tamburlane), and rose to the station of emperor in the middle of the 15^th C.  But his true passion was chasing knowledge, especially about the sciences, and within the sciences especially about mathematics and astronomy.  He calculated sine and tangent values to eight decimal places.  Also he spoke five languages.  He was a brainy dude who just happened also to have the treasury of an empire behind him. And what he did with that treasure was invest in science.

Ulugh Beg built his madrassa decades before he reigned and populated it with the best mathematical minds in the empire. (And I went to the top of its northern minaret!)

Then he built something even cooler:  an observatory.  

 (Here's a model of the building that held the observatory, in the museum next door)

If you’ve heard of Ulugh Beg before, it’s probably because of the observatory. (Indeed, B and I spent some time with the details of Ulugh Beg's astronomical achievements at the Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam.)  At the time of its operation, it was the largest observatory in Central Asia.  Ulugh Beg used it to catalogue the movements of over 1000 stars.  He determined the length of a year on earth to just 28 seconds off of accurate (closer than Copernicus), and he calculated the angle of the earth’s tilt.  

The observatory, or at least the central sextant (the Farkhi sextant), sits right where he left it, all 36-meter radius of it, though the grand building that housed it has not survived.   

So, scroll back up and look at the picture of the madrassa Ulugh Beg built.  See the design of the ornamental tiles that grace the portal?  Those are stars.