--- title: Google Doodle Honors Polymath Avicenna for 1038th Birthday description: Google Doodle celebrates what would be the 1038th birthday of Avicenna, one of the most influential pre-modern thinkers canonical: https://time.com/5359483/google-doodle-avicenna-ib-sina/ author: Casey Quackenbush article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-08-07T07:39:53.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:47:14.686Z og:title: What to Know About Avicenna, Polymath of Islamic Golden Age og:description: The father of early modern medicine was born 1,038 years ago og:url: https://time.com/5359483/google-doodle-avicenna-ib-sina/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt20a27d173fc5c276/6989372f22fb850fe9e265c7/ibn-sinas-1038th-birthday-5768556863029248-2-2x.png?branch=production&width=818&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 818 og:image:height: 460 og:image:alt: ibn-sinas-1038th-birthday-5768556863029248.2-2x og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: What to Know About Avicenna, Polymath of Islamic Golden Age twitter:description: The father of early modern medicine was born 1,038 years ago twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt20a27d173fc5c276/6989372f22fb850fe9e265c7/ibn-sinas-1038th-birthday-5768556863029248-2-2x.png?branch=production&width=818&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Here's What to Know About Avicenna, Great Medical Mind of the Islamic Golden Age > Sponsored content. 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Google Doodle by [Casey Quackenbush](https://time.com/author/casey-quackenbush/) ## Casey Quackenbush Aug 7, 2018 7:39 AM UTC Astronomy, medicine, theology, physics, arithmetic, poetry — there was seemingly no discipline left untouched by the renowned polymath Avicenna, celebrated today by [Google Doodle](https://www.google.com/doodles/ibn-sinas-1038th-birthday) in honor of what would be his 1,038th birthday. Also known as Ibn Sīnā, Avicenna was one of the most influential thinkers of the medieval Islamic world. Born in 980 during the Islamic Golden Age, Avicenna was a self-taught intellectual. Growing up in Afšana, a village near Bukhara in what is present-day Uzbekistan, Avicenna learned Indian arithmetic from a grocer, pursued an intense study of Aristotle’s _Metaphysics_ during his teenage years and began studying medicine at age of 16. Avicenna was also a prolific writer, authoring at least 131 books. His contributions to medicine were particularly significant. _Al Qanun fil-Tibb_, or the _Canon of Medicine_, is a monumental medical encyclopedia that was translated into Latin in the 12th century and used as the primary text for European medical courses until the 17th century. Avicenna’s work was the first to recognize diseases like tuberculosis and postulate that illnesses could spread through soil and water. The _Canon_, having established some of the fundamentals of anatomy, pediatrics, and gynecology, is now recognized as laying the groundwork for Western medicine. Avicenna also wrote extensively on early Islamic philosophy. One of his most famous works, the _Book of Healing_, is a science and philosophic encyclopedia intended to cure ailments of the soul. Also called the _Cure,_ Avicenna’s metaphysics is said to have had a [major impact](https://www.iep.utm.edu/avicenna/#H5) on European scholasticism, and in particular the Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas. In June 1037, Avicenna was struck with severe colic, a disease of the abdomen. He was 58 when he died, and laid to rest in Hamadan, Iran. ## Transcript [00:01] >>The Doodle [00:07] team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, [00:10] and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even [00:13] sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially [00:17] collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate [00:21] with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on [00:25] this project. [00:34] >>We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and [00:36] we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, [00:39] flowers and things like that. But Ira and his [00:44] team are awesome. [00:44] >>They were able to pull stories that they have collected [00:47] over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and [00:49] they're all about love in all different respects of the word. [00:55] They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really [00:58] fun and really sweet. [00:59] >>The stories run the [ unk ]. There is [01:03] a story about middle school love. [01:03] >>I was in the cafeteria, just got [01:07] on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. [01:11] >>There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that [01:14] she made a mistake. [01:14] >>My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I [01:14] could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and [01:20] I-- and I called the police because I thought [01:24] he got lost or something happened. [01:28] >>When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I [01:31] listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of [01:34] where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. [01:37] >>One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. [01:43] We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just [01:46] drew everyone as a dog. [01:47] >>Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. [01:47] >>And when you click on it, the heart will flip, [01:52] the audio will play and you will also see the images that [01:55] we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, [01:59] now we are all going to brainstorms together because we [02:02] need the creative side and we also need the technical side [02:04] to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this [02:08] one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, [02:12] because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I [02:15] first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only [02:17] did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more [02:21] animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we [02:24] needed a dedicated team. [02:24] >>Some of our most like ambitious to those have come [02:26] from engineers that are just incredibly talented [02:30] and spare similar time for our projects. [02:33] >>Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that [02:36] is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology [02:41] hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too [02:43] conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to [02:46] tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. [02:53] The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep [02:56] my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting [03:00] a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw [03:03] and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." [03:07] >>We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. [03:08] We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences [03:11] are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what [03:14] you're gonna get. 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