Ali Abdullah Al-Daffa (Arabic: علي بن عبدالله الدفـّاع) (born 1943 (1362 H) in Unaizah, Al Gassim, Saudi Arabia) is a mathematician, scientist, author, professor, and expert on the history of science and Islam.
[1] Upon receiving his PhD, Al-Daffa joined King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia in 1972 as an assistant professor.
[citation needed] He is the author of 36 books on mathematics and the history of sciences (32 in Arabic, 4 in English) and more than 250 articles in international and Saudi magazines.
One of his better known books in English is The Muslim Contribution to Mathematics (Croom Helm, 1977,[2] reissued in 2015 by Routledge Library Editions as part of its series, "Islamic Thought In The Middle Ages")[3] He has been honored as one of the best researchers in the Islamic world.
With respect to the history of science, one of his major concerns is to remind persons that in many areas of astronomy, architecture, mathematics and the natural and social sciences, scientific knowledge was preserved by Arab scholars translating from Greek to Arabic, from which such knowledge was ultimately disseminated to medieval Europe.