Ulugh Beg

Ulugh Beg, also known as “the biggest boss in Uzbekistan”, was a 15th century astronomer prince who made some seriously cool advancements in the field of stargazing.

Despite being the grandson of the infamous Timur (a.k.a. Tamerlane, the conqueror who killed more people than a Game of Thrones episode), Ulugh Beg was a total science nerd. He built an observatory in Samarkand and used it to catalogue the positions of over 1,000 stars with impressive accuracy. Apparently, he could even predict eclipses and figure out the length of a year to within 20 seconds. Yeah, you heard that right - this dude was basically the medieval Neil deGrasse Tyson.

So why hasn’t Ulugh Beg gotten more recognition? Well, turns out his dad wasn’t too fond of his son’s telescope obsession. When he died, Ulugh Beg’s bro Dang Khan took over and kicked him off the throne, forcing him to live out the rest of his days as a scholar. Talk about a rough family dynamic.

Fortunately, Ulugh Beg’s legacy lives on, with his name gracing an asteroid and a lunar crater. Heck, there’s even a statue of him in Uzbekistan that looks like a cross between Snape from Harry Potter and a garden gnome. That’s immortality right there.

So next time you’re gazing up at the stars and wondering how the heck anyone figured this stuff out, remember Ulugh Beg - the prince who switched swords for sextants and still managed to be a total boss.