Mathematics and the sciences entered a long period of stagnation with the decline of the Greek and Roman civilizations. This inactivity was uninterrupted until after the Islamic religion and the resulting Islamic culture were founded by the prophet Muhammad in A.D. 622. Within a century , the Islamic empire stretched from Spain , Sicily , and Northern Africa to India.
Islamic culture encouraged the development of the sciences , as well as the arts. Arab scholars translated many Greek and Hindu works in mathematics and the sciences , including Apollonius's work on conic sections. It is likely that much of the Greeks' work in science and mathematics would have been lost if not for these Arab scholars.