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The grandson of the conqueror Timur the Lame ( 1336- 1405) and oldest son of Shah Rukh, both of whom came from the Turkic Barlas tribe of Transoxiana (present Uzbekistan), Ulugh Beg was born in Sultaniyya in modern-day IranIran ( Persian: ) is a Middle Eastern country located in southwestern Asia that until 1935 was referred to in the West as Persia''. It borders Pakistan (909km of border) and Afghanistan (936km) to the east, Turkmenistan (1000km) to the northeast, the Casp. As a child he wandered through a substantial chunk of the Middle EastThe Middle East is a geographical and cultural area comprising the lands around the southern and eastern parts of the Mediterranean Sea, a territory that extends from the eastern Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. The Middle East is a subregion of Afr and IndiaThe Republic of India is a large multicultural country in South Asia, with a population of over one billion. The Indian economy is the fourth largest in the world, in terms of purchasing power parity, and is the world's second-fastest growing economy. as his grandfather expanded his conquests in those areas. With Timur's death, however, and the accession of Ulugh's father to much of the Timurid Empire, he settled in SamarkandSamarkand (Samarqand or in Uzbek) (population 400,000) is the second-largest city in Uzbekistan, capital of the Samarkand region ( Samarqand Wiloyati). The majority of the city's inhabitants is Tajik. Timur's mausoleum Gur-e Amir at Samarkand History The which had been Timur's capital. After Shah Rukh moved the capital to Herat (in modern AfghanistanAfghanistan ( Dari/ Pashtu: Afgnistn is a country in Central Asia. It is bordered by Iran in the west, Pakistan in the south and east, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the north, and China in the easternmost part of the country. It is among the), sixteen year-old Ulugh Beg became the shah's governor in Samarkand in 1409. In 1411 he became a sovereign of the whole Mavarannhar khanate.

The teenaged ruler set out to turn the city into an intellectual center for the empire. In 1417 - 1420 he built a madrasa ("university" or "institute") on Registan Square in Samarkand, and invited numerous Islamic astronomers and mathematicians to study there. Ulugh Beg's most famous pupil in mathematics was Ghiyath al-Kashi (circa 1370 - 1429).

His own particular interests concentrated on astronomy, and in 1428 he built an enormous observatory, called the Gurkhani Zij, similar to Tycho Brahe's later Uraniborg. Lacking telescopes to work with, he increased his accuracy by increasing the length of his sextant; the so-called Fakhri Sextant had a radius of circa 36 meters and the optical separability of 180" (seconds of arc). Using it he compiled the 1437 Zij-i Sultani of 994 stars, generally considered the greatest of star catalogues between those of Ptolemy and Brahe. The serious errors which he found in the Arabian star catalogues (the authors had simply copied from Ptolemy, adding the effect of precession to the longitudes) induced him to redetermine the positions of 992 fixed stars, to which he added 27 stars from Al Sufi's catalogue from 964, which were too far south for observation from Samarkand. This catalogue, the first original one since Ptolemy, was edited by Thomas Hyde at Oxford in 1665 (Tabulae longitudinis et latitudinis stellarum fixarum ex observatione Ulugbeighi), by G. Sharpe in 1767, and in 1843 by Francis Baily in vol. xiii. of the Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society .

In 1437 Ulugh Beg determined the length of the sidereal year as 365.2570370...^d = 365^d 6^h 10^m 8^s (an error +58^s). In his measurements within many years he used a 50 m high gnomon. This value was improved by 28^s 88 years later in 1525 by Nicolaus Copernicus ( 1473- 1543), who appealed to the estimation of Thabit ibn Qurra ( 826- 901), which was accurate to +2^s.

Ulugh Beg was also notable for his work in astronomy-related mathematics, such as trigonometry and spherical geometry.

Unfortunately for Ulug he was the heir of Shah Rukh, and when his father died in 1447 he became ruler of the Timurid Empire. Within two years he was beheaded by his own eldest son, 'Abd al-Latif , while on his way to Mecca. Eventually, however, he was rehabilitated by his grandson Babur, founder of the Mogul Empire, who placed Ulugh Beg's remains in the tomb of Timur in Samarkand. There archeologists found them in 1941.

In honour of his achievements, a crater on the Moon has been named for him, Ulug Beigh (the spelling used by the German astronomer Johann Heinrich von Mädler ( 1794- 1874) who proposed the name in his 1830 map of the Moon).

This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. 1911 Britannica