Short answers, pulled from the story.
Avicenna, known in Arabic as Ibn Sina, was a preeminent philosopher and physician of the Muslim world and a seminal figure of the Islamic Golden Age. He is often described as the father of early modern medicine, and his most famous works are The Book of Healing and The Canon of Medicine.
Avicenna was born around 980 in the village of Afshana in Transoxiana, into a Persian family. The village was near Bukhara, the Samanid capital and his mother's hometown, and the family later settled in Bukhara.
The Canon of Medicine is Avicenna's five-volume medical work covering general principles, medicinal substances, disease and treatments, health maintenance, and specific ailments. It served as a standard medical textbook in the Islamic world and Europe and remained in use as late as 1650.
The Floating Man is a thought experiment Avicenna wrote while imprisoned in the fortress of Fardajan, asking readers to imagine a person created complete but suspended in air with no sensation. He argued the person would still affirm his own existence, demonstrating that the soul is an immaterial substance independent of the body.
Avicenna died on the 22nd of June 1037 in Hamadan, where he was buried. In 1037, while accompanying the Kakuyid ruler Ala al-Dawla to a battle near Isfahan, he contracted a severe colic, an affliction he had suffered throughout his life.
Avicenna is believed to have written around 450 works, of which roughly 240 have survived. Of the survivors, about 150 concentrate on philosophy and 40 on medicine.
Avicenna's Canon of Medicine was used in European universities, and from the early fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries he was ranked with Hippocrates and Galen as princeps medicorum, the prince of physicians. His psychology influenced William of Auvergne and Albertus Magnus, his metaphysics influenced Thomas Aquinas, and Dante placed him in Limbo in the Divine Comedy.