Mathematician Al-Khurishmi on a Soviet stamp
In a world in which algorithms are beginning to decide entire lives, from the possibility of achieving jobs to the music we listen to or the couples suggested by applications, it is curious to think that the sophisticated word algorithm comes from the surname of a great Persian mathematician, born in today's Uzbekistan, who lived more than a thousand years ago: Mohamed ben Musa Khwarazmi, Arabized as al Khwarizmi and hence Latinized as Algoritmi. In Spanish, this mathematician and geographer who lived between 780 and 850 approximately is known as Al Juarismi and his name has also given rise to the word guarismo.
At a time of splendor in the Islamic world, Al-Khwarizmi was the astronomer and head of the library of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad – often compared to the Library of Alexandria – and his books and findings made him the father of algebra, a word that comes from the title of one of his treatises, the Hisab al-yabr wa'l muqabala (Compendium of Calculation by Restoration and Reduction). A book of eminently practical use for trade, inheritance or the measurement of land, but also the first known treatise that studies in depth the resolution of equations and that was used until the sixteenth century in European universities.
Ceramic plate with the effigy of Al-Juarismi, in the Matpana Baya madrasa of Jiva
Al-yabr, restoration, the word of the title that has given rise to the term algebra, is one of the basic operations it offers to solve equations and that consists, as any student knows, in passing the negative terms from one side of the equation as positive to the other. While the other operation, the muqabala, consists of simplifying the equation by grouping similar terms together.
Indian figures will look like Arabs in the West for coming from the Islamic world
But it is key for many more reasons: to him we owe the numbers we use in the West, the Indians. In his Book of Addition and Subtraction according to the Indian calculation he describes the decimal system that he has observed in mathematics from India and is the vehicle for the dissemination of these figures in the Arab world and, from there, to the European one, where they will be seen as Arab figures, ours today.
Leonardo of Pisa, better known as Fibonacci, would be the last bridge for Indian numbers to reach the West
A Europe where these guarismos will replace the less practical Roman numerals and bring zero. A zero that comes from the word sunya in Sanskrit, empty, which happens to be sifr in Arabic, and that Leonardo of Pisa, better known as Fibonacci called in the thirteenth century zephyro in Italian, a word that was contracted to zero by the Venetians. A Fibonacci whose father was a merchant in Bejaia, Algeria, where he knew the figures that his son would promote in a Europe in which mathematical thinking and its possibilities would change although it would still take centuries to completely replace the capital letters of ancient Rome.
0 Comments