These manuscripts can then be traced to Western Europe via Arab conquest, first through North Africa, and then into Spain.  Toledo, Cordova and Seville were outstanding centers of learning from the 9th to the llth centuries. 

Later, Galileo (1564 - 1642) discovered that a cannonball follows a parabolic path.  Scientists, monarchs and military leaders immediately took great interest!  The aiming of a cannon became a function of measuring the precise angle of a trajectory, the "throw weight" and its momentum.  With these experiments and especially the famous dropping of objects from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Galileo revolutionized science.  He introduced the "scientific method" as a permanent contribution to civilization.  Later his heliocentric theory of the universe almost cost him his life.

Descartes, in writing La Géométrie (1637), chose the parabola to illustrate his innovative analytic geometry.  At this time in publishing history, all math figures were difficult to create and to print.

In 1992, R. A. Marcus of the California Institute of Technology won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work showing that parabolic reaction surfaces can be used to calculate how fast electrons travel in molecules.  His most famous theoretical result, an inverted rate-energy parabola, predicts electron transfer will slow down at very high reaction free energies.

Millions of students in recent centuries will remember the parabola as the introductory curve leading into study of the Calculus.