earliest roots of science can be traced to the works of Ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, whose contributions entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek science deteriorated in Western Europe during the Middle Ages but flourished in the Islamic Golden Age. Modern science is typically divided into three major branches that consist of the natural sciences (e.g. biology, chemistry, physics), which study nature in the broadest sense; the social sciences (e.g. psychology, sociology, economics), which study individuals and societies; and the formal sciences (e.g. mathematics, logic, theoretical computer science), which study abstract concepts.