Who Was Ibn-al-Haitham?

Abu Ali Hassan ibn Al-Haitham, who is known as Alhazen in the West, was a great scientist, and is also known as 'The Father of Modern Optics'.
Abu Ali Hassan ibn Al-Haitham was an eminent physicist. He was born at Basra, Iraq, in 965 C.E. He got his education in Basra and Baghdad. He also travelled to Egypt and Spain.
Abu Ali Hassan ibn Al-Haitham experimented on the propagation of light and colons. He also experimented on optic illusions and reflection. He studied the reflection of light through a transparent medium such as air and water. He studied and experimented upon the diverging of light from its true path when it enters from a lighter medium to a denser one.
Abu Ali Hassan ibn Al-Haitham did a great deal of research on the external and internal structure(anatomy) of eye. He is also the inventor of the pinhole camera, which later evolved into the modern camera. He got the idea of the pinhole camera after being able to view a Solar Eclipse on the wall opposite a hole in  a window in a dark room.
Ibn Al-Haitham's famous book, Kitab-al-Manazir, was translated into Latin in the Middle Ages. Roger Beorcon, Pole Vitellio and all Western writers base their optical works on Abu Ali Hassan ibn Al-Haitham's 'Optical Thesaurus'.  
Abu Ali Hassan ibn Al-Haitham died in 1040 C.E.

Ibn-al-Haitham was a famous Muslim scholar who was born in Iraq; he was brought up in Egypt, under Al-Hakim.  His work was famous in the fields of optics, physics, mathematics and astronomy. He made an analysis of passage of light through different optical mediums and discovered the phenomenon of refraction. He carried out the experiments on the dispersion of light into its constituent seven colours.  Out of the several books he wrote, his book Kiab-al-Manazir was translated into Latin and has greatly affected the western scientists. In his work on optics he dealt with the theory of physical phenomenon like shadows, rainbow eclipses. He also speculated the nature of light. In addition to his work on images he also tried to study human eye and explained the activity of vision, he explained that the objects are seen by rays of light emerging from the object not from the eye of viewer. He also studied the increase and decrease in the size of an image when viewed by a human eye, and attempted to explain binocular.
He also did some important work in the field of mathematics like he was the one to introduce analytical geometry by establishing a relation between algebra and geometry.