al-Kindi

Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī (/ælˈkɪndi/; Arabic: أبو يوسف يعقوب بن إسحاق الصبّاح الكندي; Latin: Alkindus; c. 801–873 AD) was an Arab Muslim polymath active as a philosopher, mathematician, physician, and music theorist. Al-Kindi was the first of the Islamic peripatetic philosophers, and is hailed as the “father of Arab philosophy“.^[4][5][6]

Al-Kindi was born in Kufa and educated in Baghdad.^[7] He became a prominent figure in the House of Wisdom, and a number of Abbasid Caliphs appointed him to oversee the translation of Greek scientific and philosophical texts into the Arabic language. This contact with “the philosophy of the ancients” (as Hellenistic philosophy was often referred to by Muslim scholars) had a profound effect on him, as he synthesized, adapted and promoted Hellenistic and Peripatetic philosophy in the Muslim world.^[8] He subsequently wrote hundreds of original treatises of his own on a range of subjects ranging from metaphysics, ethics, logic and psychology, to medicine, pharmacology,^[9] mathematics, astronomy, astrology and optics, and further afield to more practical topics like perfumes, swords, jewels, glass, dyes, zoology, tides, mirrors, meteorology and earthquakes.

In the field of mathematics, al-Kindi played an important role in introducing Hindu numerals to the Islamic world, and their further development into Arabic numerals along with al-Khwarizmi which eventually was adopted by the rest of the world.^[12] Al-Kindi was also one of the fathers of cryptography.^[13][14] Building on the work of al-Khalil (717–786),^[15] Al-Kindi’s book entitled Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages gave rise to the birth of cryptanalysis, was the earliest known use of statistical inference,^[16] and introduced several new methods of breaking ciphers, notably frequency analysis.^[17][18] He was able to create a scale that would enable doctors to gauge the effectiveness of their medication by combining his knowledge of mathematics and medicine.

The central theme underpinning al-Kindi’s philosophical writings is the compatibility between philosophy and other “orthodox” Islamic sciences, particularly theology, and many of his works deal with subjects that theology had an immediate interest in. These include the nature of God, the soul and prophetic knowledge.^[

Al-Kindi is credited with developing a method whereby variations in the frequency of the occurrence of letters could be analyzed and exploited to break ciphers (i.e. cryptanalysis by frequency analysis).^[18] His book on this topic is Risāla fī Istikhrāj al-Kutub al-Mu’ammāh (رسالة في استخراج الكتب المعماة; literally: On Extracting Obscured Correspondence, more contemporarily: On Decrypting Encrypted Correspondence). In his treatise on cryptanalysis, he wrote:

One way to solve an encrypted message, if we know its language, is to find a different plaintext of the same language long enough to fill one sheet or so, and then we count the occurrences of each letter. We call the most frequently occurring letter the “first”, the next most occurring letter the “second”, the following most occurring letter the “third”, and so on, until we account for all the different letters in the plaintext sample. Then we look at the cipher text we want to solve and we also classify its symbols. We find the most occurring symbol and change it to the form of the “first” letter of the plaintext sample, the next most common symbol is changed to the form of the “second” letter, and the following most common symbol is changed to the form of the “third” letter, and so on, until we account for all symbols of the cryptogram we want to solve

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