Seyyed Hossein Nasr was born in Tehran on 7 April 1933. He earned a BS in physics at MIT (1954), an MS in geology and geophysics (1956) and a PhD in the history of science at Harvard (1958), then became professor and dean at Tehran University, president of Aryamehr University and founder of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. After the 1979 Iranian Revolution he taught at Temple University and from 1984 at George Washington University. His works, such as Science and Civilization in Islam, Three Muslim Sages and Knowledge and the Sacred (Gifford Lectures 1980–1981), are references for perennial philosophy and Islamic science; in Malaysia educated circles came to know his thought partly through al-Attas's milieu, and Osman Bakar was his student.