Al-Khwarizmi: The Father of Algebra | Mathematics - Medium

Hazel Clementine writes, If you’re taking algebra for the first time, you might think to yourself, algebra kind of a strange word. It doesn’t sound like people were speaking English at the time.

We call it algebra because of the person pictured in the image above. His name is Al-Khwarizmi. He writes the first algebra book around the year 800. The Soviet Union issued this postage stamp in 1983 to mark the 1200th anniversary of the birth of Al-Khwarizmi. At that time, at Al-Khwarizmi, his birthplace was part of the Soviet Union...

The town Al-Khwarizmi was born is now Kiva in Uzbekistan. So why do we call it algebra? Well, here’s a page out of Al-Khwarizmi’s book, the first algebra book written in the year 800.

The title of that book is al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wal-muqābala. In English, it is The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. We call it algebra because of the word “al-jabr” in the title of Al-Khwarizmi’s book. The term “algebra” is part of his algebra book’s title book written in 800 by Al-Khwarizmi.

If you go to the online dictionary and look up the word algebra and look for its origins, you’ll see that same word right there. It turns out that in Al-Khwarizmi’s algebra book, we see some algorithmic processes, like long division, long multiplication, and things like that.

So if you take a computer science class, you’ll see that the word algorithm also comes from Al-Khwarizmi’s name because he’s the first person credited with showing us those algorithmic processes. So that’s the origin of the word algorithm.

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Source: Medium