Avicenna (980-1037), physician and philosopher, after the bust in the Ibn Sina Museum, Bukhara. He was born in Central Asia, near Bukhara, then in the Persian empire. Avicenna is the Latinised version of Ibn Sina, his full Arabic name is Abu-Ali Al-Husain Ibn Abdullah Ibn Sina. He is perhaps the most influential of the medieval philosophers, affecting muslim, christian and jewish thought. Some of his philosophical concepts find echoes in the works of Descartes and Leibniz. Ibn Sina had access to the published works of the ancient Greco-Roman, Indian, Byzantine, Persian and Egyptian civilisations. His ???he Book of Healing??was a philosophical and scientific encyclopedia on mathematics, astronomy, metaphysics and logic. He published a medical encyclopedia ???he Canon of Medicine??which became a standard medical text in many universities for the next 700 years.