Al-Kindi (c. 801–c. 873) was an Arab polymath of Baghdad's House of Wisdom, hailed as the father of Arab philosophy, whose Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages invented cryptanalysis — including frequency analysis, the earliest known use of statistical inference, eleven centuries before the computer age.
Born in Kufa and educated in Baghdad, he oversaw the translation of Greek science into Arabic for Abbasid caliphs and then wrote hundreds of original treatises of his own, from metaphysics and optics to medicine, music theory and perfumes.
