Sains dan teknologi di Iran

Matematik

Salah seorang ahli matematik terhebat dari antikuiti, yang bermuncul pada hujung kurun ke-9, adalah seorang Iran dengan nama Muhammad Ibn Musa-al-Kharazmi, yang karyanya mengesankan budaya Islam dan Eropah selepas kurun ke-12. Ahli matematik terkenal ini, temabahan pada susunan jadual tokoh digelar Algoritma, juga membangunkan algebra dan mempehaharukan sisem aritmetik Iran dan India. Karyanya pada algebra telah diterjemahkan ke dalam bahasa Latin oleh penterjemah bahasa Latin Gerard dari Cremona dan berjudul: De jebra et almucabola. Robert dari Chester juga menterjemahkannya di bawah judul Liber algebras et almucabala. Karya Khwarizmi "melatihkan suatu pengaruh penting pada pembangunan fikiran matematik di Barat pada zaman pertengahan".
Matematik telah kemudian dibangunkan oleh ahli sains seperti Abu Abbas Fazl Hatam, adik-beradik lelaki Banu Musa, Farahani, Omar Ibn Farakhan, Abu Zeid Ahmad Ibn Soheil Balkhi (kurun ke-9 AM), Abul Vafa Bouzjani, Abu Jaafar Khan, Bijan Ibn Rostam Kouhi, Ahmad Ibn Abdul Jalil Qomi, Bu Nasr Iraqi, Abu Reyhan al-Biruni, penyair Iran terkenal Hakim Omar Khayyam Neishaburi, Qatan Marvazi, Massoudi Ghaznavi (kurun ke-13 AM), Khajeh Nassireddin Tusi, dan Ghiasseddin Jamshidi Kashani.

Astronomi

Pada 1000 AM, Biruni menuliskan sebuah ensiklopedia astronomi yang membincangkan kemungkinan bahawa bumi mungkin bumi mengelilingi matahari. Ini adalah sebelum Tycho Brahe melukiskan peta-peta pertama langit, mengunakan haiwan digayakan untuk menggambarkan gugusan bintang.
Pada kurun kesepuluh, ahli astronomi Parsi Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi menoleh matanya ke atas pada awning of stars overhead dan adalah yang pertama untuk merakamkan suatu galaksi bersama dengan milik kita. Merenung pada galaksi Andromeda dia menggelarnya "awam kecil" - penjelasan apt kemunculan seikat kawan kejirnan galaktik kita.

Biologi

Pada kurun ke-13, lebih daripada 600 tahun sebelum Charles Darwin, Nasir al-Din Tusi memajukan suatu teori asas evolusi. Perbezaan utama wujud di antara kecapaian Asal-usul Spesis Tusi dan Darwin. Sementara Darwin menggunakan alasan deduktif, mengumpul sapel tumbuh-tumbuhan dan haiwan untuk menjalankan caranya dari fakta ke suatu teori, Tusi used a more theoretical approach. Tusi explained that "hereditary variability" was the leading force of evolution. He wrote that all living organisms were able to change and that the animate organisms developed owing to their hereditary variability, saying "the organisms that can gain the new features faster are more variable. As a result, they gain advantages over other creatures." This sounds remarkably like a simplistic form of Darwin's writings about mutations. Tusi was correct when he suggested that "the bodies are changing as a result of the internal and external interactions"; that is, as a result of environmental influences. Tusi wrote "look at the world of animals and birds. They have all that is necessary for defense, protection and daily life, including strength, courage, and appropriate tools (organs)". Tusi also believed that humans are derived from advanced animals. He wrote about the different transition forms between the human and animal world, saying "such humans (probably anthropoid apes) live in the Western Sudan and other distant corners of the world. They are close to animals by their habits, deeds and behavior".
Tusi said that humans are related to all living and inanimate creatures of Nature, writing that "the human has features that distinguish him from other creatures, but he has other features that unite him with the animal world, the vegetable kingdom or even with the inanimate bodies".

Kimia

Tusi believed that a body of matter is able to change but is not able to disappear entirely. He wrote "a body of matter cannot disappear completely. It only changes its form, condition, composition, color, and other properties, and turns into a different complex or elementary matter". Five hundred years later, Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765) and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) created the law of conservation of mass, setting down this same idea. However, it should be noted that Tusi argued for evolution within a firmly Islamic context—he did not, like Darwin, draw materialist conclusions from his theories. Moreover, unlike Darwin, he was arguing hypothetically: he did not attempt to provide empirical data for his theories. Nonetheless his arguments, which in some ways prefigure natural selection, are still considered remarkably 'advanced' for their time.
Jaber Ibn Hayyan, the famous Iranian chemist who died in 804 at Tous in Khorasan, was the father of a number of discoveries recorded in an encyclopaedia and of many treatises covering two thousand topics, and these became the bible of European chemists of the 18th century, particularly of Lavoisier. These works had a variety of uses including tinctures and their applications in tanning and textiles; distillations of plants and flowers; the origin of perfumes; therapeutic pharmacy, and gunpowder, a powerful military instrument possessed by Islam long before the West. Jabir ibn Hayyan, is widely regarded as the founder of chemistry, inventing many of the basic processes and equipment still used by chemists today such as distillation.

Fizik

Abu Ali al'Hasan ibn al'Haitam is known in the West as Alhazen, born in 965 in Persia and dying in 1039 in Egypt. He is known as the father of optics for his writings on, and experiments with, lenses, mirrors, refraction, and reflection. He correctly stated that vision results from light that is reflected into the eye by an object, not emitted by the eye itself and reflected back, as Aristotle believed. He solved the problem of finding the locus of points on a spherical mirror from which light will be reflected to an observer. From his studies of refraction, he determined that the atmosphere has a definite height and that twilight is caused by refraction of solar radiation from beneath the horizon.  Biruni was the first scientist to formally propose that the speed of light is finite, before Galileo tried to experimentally prove this.

Bioteknologi

Agricultural research has been successful in releasing high yielding varieties with higher stability as well as tolerance to harsh weather conditions. The agriculture researchers are working jointly with international Institutes to find the best procedures and genotypes to overcome produce failure and to increase yield. In 2005, Iran's first genetically modified (GM) rice was approved by national authorities and is being grown commercially for human consumption. In addition to GM rice, Iran has produced several GM plants in the laboratory, such as insect-resistant maize; cotton; potatoes and sugar beets; herbicide-resistant canola; salinity- and drought-tolerant wheat; and blight-resistant maize and wheat. The Royan Institute engineered Iran's first cloned animal; the sheep was born on August 2, 2006 and has passed the critical first two months of his life.
In the last months of 2006, Iranian biotechnologists announced that they, as the third manufacturer in the world, have sent CinnoVex (a recombinant type of Interferon b1a) to the market. According to a study by David Morrison and Ali Khademhosseini (Harvard-MIT and Cambridge), stem cell research in Iran is amongst the top 10 in the world.  Iran will invest 2.5 billion dollars in the country's stem cell research over the next five years (2008-2013).

Nanoteknologi

Iran ranked 25th in the world in Nanotechnology in 2007 with highest, ranked paper citation international mean, amongst all Islamic countries and only second to S.Korea in Asia. They are now 15th (2010) in the world ranking. In 2007 Iranian scientists at the Medical Sciences and Technology Center succeeded in mass producing an advanced scanning microscope—the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM).

Astronomi

The Iranian government has committed 150 billion rials (roughly $17.5 million) for a telescope, an observatory, and a training program, all part of a plan to build up the country's astronomy base. Iran wants to collaborate internationally and become internationally competitive in astronomy, says the University of Michigan's Carl Akerlof, an adviser to the Iranian project. "For a government that is usually characterized as wary of foreigners, that's an important development".