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Ulugh Beg, the Mathematician Sultan

Muhammad Taraghay Ulugh Beg was the fourth Sultan of the Timurid Empire. He was the descendant of the worldwide known Amir Timur (Tamerlane). Interestingly, he was a Sultan, mathematician and astronomer at the same time. He was born on 22 March, 1394 at Sultaniyeh in Timurid Empire. The mighty ruler Amir Timur (Tamerlane) was ruling the empire at that time.

Ulugh Beg composed a star catalogue consisting of 1018 stars, which is eleven fewer stars than are present in the star catalogue of Ptolemy.Throughout his life as an astronomer, Ulugh Beg came to realize that there were multiple mistakes in the work and subsequent data of Ptolemy that had been in use for many years. Not only that, he also mentioned almost accurate measurements for the sidereal year (365 days 6 hours 10 minutes and 8 seconds), and for the tropical year, he mentioned 365 days 5 hours 49 minutes and 15 seconds, which was more accurate than Copernicus' estimate.

He also discovered the obliquity of the elliptic, which was very important in the study of astronomy. He was also a great mathematician, with keen interests in trigonometry. He wrote trigonometric tables of sine and tangent values, accurate to at least eight decimal places.

Ulugh Beg was made governor of Samarqand in Timurid Empire under the reign of his father, Shah Rukh Mirza. He built the great Ulugh Beg Observatory in Samarqand between 1424 and 1429, which was one of the finest observatories in Islamic world and largest in Central Asia at that time. He also built the Ulugh Beg Madrasah from 1417 to 1420 in Samarqand and Bukhara. He was known as the most important observational astronomer by many scholars from the 15th century AD.

However, despite being such a great mathematician and astronomer, Ulugh Beg was made the Sultan of Timurid Empire on March 13, 1447, a day before the Mathematics Day. However, his reign was short-lived, and full of struggles. The war of succession caused the Timurid Empire to become fragmented, with Ala-ad-Dawla and Abul-Qasim Babur Mirza declaring as the Sultan. Ulugh Beg went to encounter them, with defeating the first, but being defeated against the second. Not only that, his Sultanate was also being conquered by the rival Jahan Shah ibn Yusuf of the Qara Qoyunlu, a Turkoman dynasty closely related to Azerbaijanis. Ulugh Beg had to surrender to his son Abdul-Latif Mirza, who granted him the permission to go for Hajj. However, Abdul-Latif assassinated his mathematician father on his route for Hajj on 27 October 1449.