Ibn Sahl

Who was Ibn Sahl?

Ibn Sahl was a Muslim Persian mathematician, physicist and optics engineer of the Islamic Golden Age associated with the Abbasid court of Baghdad. Ibn Sahl's 984 treatise On Burning Mirrors and Lenses sets out his understanding of how curved mirrors and lenses bend and focus light. Ibn Sahl is credited with first discovering the law of refraction, usually called Snell's law. He used the law of refraction to derive lens shapes that focus light with no geometric aberrations, known as anaclastic lenses.

In the reproduction of the figure from Ibn Sahl's manuscript, the critical part is the right-angled triangle. The inner hypotenuse shows the path of an incident ray and the outer hypotenuse shows an extension of the path of the refracted ray if the incident ray met a crystal whose face is vertical at the point where the two hypotenuses intersect. According to Roshdi Rashed, an author and historian of medieval science and mathematics, the ratio of the length of the smaller hypotenuse to the larger is the reciprocal of the refractive index of the crystal.

The lower part of the figure shows a representation of a plano-convex lens and its principal axis. The curvature of the convex part of the lens brings all rays parallel to the horizontal axis to a focal point on the axis at the left.