This article lists inventions and discoveries made by scientists with Pakistani nationality within Pakistan and outside the country, as well as those made in the territorial area of what is now Pakistan prior to the independence of Pakistan in 1947.
Button, ornamental: Buttons—made from seashell—were used in the Indus Valley civilization for ornamental purposes by 2000 BCE.[2] Some buttons were carved into geometric shapes and had holes pieced into them so that they could attached to clothing by using a thread.[2] Ian McNeil (1990) holds that: "The button, in fact, was originally used more as an ornament than as a fastening, the earliest known being found at Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley. It is made of a curved shell and about 5000 years old."[3]
Plough, animal-drawn: The earliest archeological evidence of an animal-drawn plough dates back to 2500 BCE in the Indus Valley Civilization in Pakistan.[4]
Stepwell: Earliest clear evidence of the origins of the stepwell is found in the Indus Valley Civilization's archaeological site at Mohenjodaro in Pakistan.[5] The three features of stepwells in the subcontinent are evident from one particular site, abandoned by 2500 BCE, which combines a bathing pool, steps leading down to water, and figures of some religious importance into one structure.[5] The early centuries immediately before the common era saw the Buddhists and the Jains of India adapt the stepwells into their architecture.[5] Both the wells and the form of ritual bathing reached other parts of the world with Buddhism.[5] Rock-cut step wells in the subcontinent date from 200 to 400 CE.[6] Subsequently, the wells at Dhank (550-625 CE) and stepped ponds at Bhinmal (850-950 CE) were constructed.[6]
Grid Plan: By 2600 BC, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, and other major cities of the Indus Valley civilisation, were built with blocks divided by a grid of straight streets, running north–south and east–west. Each block was subdivided by small lanes.[9]
Flush Toilet: Mohenjo-Daro circa 2800 BC is cited as having some of the most advanced, with toilets built into outer walls of homes. These toilets were Western-style, albeit a primitive form, with vertical chutes, via which waste was disposed of into cesspits or street drains.[11][12]
Tanning (leather):Tanning was being carried out by the inhabitants of Mehrgarh in Pakistan between 7000 and 3300 BCE.[14]
Ancient Age
Bakhshali manuscript, detail of the numeral "zero".
Concept of Zero:A symbol for zero, a large dot likely to be the precursor of the still-current hollow symbol, is used throughout the Bakhshali manuscript, a practical manual on arithmetic for merchants, discovered in Northern Pakistan.[15] In 2017, three samples from the manuscript were shown by radiocarbon dating to come from three different centuries: from AD 224–383, AD 680–779, and AD 885–993, making it South Asia's oldest recorded use of the zero symbol. It is not known how the birch bark fragments from different centuries forming the manuscript came to be packaged together.[16][17][18]
Early Universities: Pakistan was the seat of ancient learning and some consider Taxila to be an early university[22][23][24] or centre of higher education,[25] others do not consider it a university in the modern sense[26][27][28] in contrast to the later Nalanda University.[28][29][30] Takshashila is described in some detail in later Jātaka tales, written in Sri Lanka around the 5th century CE.[31] Generally, a student entered Taxila at the age of sixteen. The Vedas and the Eighteen Arts, which included skills such as archery, hunting, and elephant lore, were taught, in addition to its law school, medical school, and school of military science.[32]
Medieval Age
Windpumps: Windpumps were used to pump water since at least the 9th century in what are now Pakistan and Iran, making its one of the earliest mentioned use.[33]
Abdus Salam who along with Steven Weinberg independently predicted the existence of a subatomic particle now called the Higgs boson, Named after a British physicist who theorized that it endowed other particles with mass.[38]
Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood a Pakistani nuclear engineer developed a device to detect heavy water leaks in nuclear steam cylinders while working at Knapp nuclear power reactor near Karachi in 1972.[45] The device is patent in his name under his initials SBM probe and is widely used in nuclear power plants to date.[46]
Medicine
Schematic representation of an implanted Ommaya reservoir.
A boot sectorcomputer virus dubbed (c)Brain, one of the first computer viruses in history,[49] was created in 1986 by the Farooq Alvi Brothers in Lahore, Pakistan, reportedly to deter unauthorized copying of the software they had written.[50][51]
The Human Development Index was devised by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq in 1990 and had the explicit purpose "to shift the focus of development economics from national income accounting to people centered policies".[54][55]
^ abHesse, Rayner W. & Hesse (Jr.), Rayner W. (2007). Jewelrymaking Through History: An Encyclopedia. Greenwood Publishing Group. 35. ISBN0-313-33507-9.
^McNeil, Ian (1990). An encyclopaedia of the history of technology. Taylor & Francis. 852. ISBN0-415-01306-2.
^Lal, R. (August 2001). "Thematic evolution of ISTRO: transition in scientific issues and research focus from 1955 to 2000". Soil and Tillage Research. 61 (1–2): 3–12 [3]. doi:10.1016/S0167-1987(01)00184-2.
"Thus the various centres of learning in different parts of the country became affiliated, as it were, to the educational centre, or the central university, of Taxila which exercised a kind of intellectual suzerainty over the wide world of letters in India."
"In the early centuries the centre of Buddhist scholarship was the University of Taxila".
^Balakrishnan Muniapan, Junaid M. Shaikh (2007), "Lessons in corporate governance from Kautilya's Arthashastra in ancient India", World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development3 (1):
"Kautilya was also a Professor of Politics and Economics at Taxila University. Taxila University is one of the oldest known universities in the world and it was the chief learning centre in ancient India."
^Radha Kumud Mookerji (2nd ed. 1951; reprint 1989), Ancient Indian Education: Brahmanical and Buddhist (p. 479), Motilal Banarsidass Publ., ISBN81-208-0423-6:
"This shows that Taxila was a seat not of elementary, but higher, education, of colleges or a university as distinguished from schools."
"It may be observed at the outset that Taxila did not possess any colleges or university in the modern sense of the term."
^F. W. Thomas (1944), in John Marshall (1951; 1975 reprint), Taxila, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi:
"We come across several Jātaka stories about the students and teachers of Takshaśilā, but not a single episode even remotely suggests that the different 'world-renowned' teachers living in that city belonged to a particular college or university of the modern type."
"Taxila, besides being a provincial seat, was also a centre of learning. It was not a university town with lecture halls and residential quarters, such as have been found at Nalanda in the Indian state of Bihar."
^Radha Kumud Mookerji (2nd ed. 1951; reprint 1989). Ancient Indian Education: Brahmanical and Buddhist (p. 478-489). Motilal Banarsidass Publ. ISBN81-208-0423-6.
^Lucas, Adam (2006). Wind, Water, Work: Ancient and Medieval Milling Technology. Brill Publishers. p. 61. ISBN90-04-14649-0.
