Who was Khajeh Nasir al-Din Toosi?

Khajeh Nasir al-Din Toosi,  (born Feb. 18, 1201, Toos, Khorasan, Iran died June 26, 1274, Baghdad, Iraq), was an outstanding Persian polymath, architect, philosopher, physician, scientist, and theologian. He is often considered the creator of trigonometry as a mathematical discipline in its own right. Khajeh Nasir Toosi was a man of exceptionally wide erudition. He wrote approximately 150 books and made original contributions to Mathematics and Astronomy. His Zij-I Ilkhani (1271;“Ilkhan Tables”), based on research at the Maragheh observatory, is a splendidly accurate table of planetary movements. Toosi’s most influential book in the west may be (“Treasury of astronomy”), which describes a geometric construction, now known as the Khajeh Nasir Toosi couple, for producing rectilinear motion from a point on one circle rolling inside another. By means of this construction, Toosi succeeded in reforming the Ptolemaic planetary models, producing a system in which all orbits are described by uniform circular motion. Most historians of Islamic astronomy believe that the planetary models developed at Maragheh found their way to Europe (perhaps via Byzantium) and provided Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) with inspiration for his astronomical models.