Muhammad
Ibn Musa Al-Khowarizmi, the father of algebra, was a mathematician
and astronomer. He was summoned to Baghdad by Al-Mamun
and appointed court astronomer. From the title of his
work, Hisab Al-Jabr wal Mugabalah (Book of Calculations,
Restoration and Reduction), Algebra (Al-Jabr) derived
its name.
His
book On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals, written about
825, was principally responsible for the diffusion of
the Indian system of numeration (Arabic numerals) in the
Islamic lands and the West.
Al-Khowarizmi
left his name to the history of mathematics in the form
of Algorism (the old name for arithmetic).
Al-Khowarizmi
emphasised that he wrote his algebra book to serve the
practical needs of the people concerning matters of inheritance,
legacies, partition, lawsuits and commerce.
In
the twelfth century Gerard of Cremona and Roberts of Chester
translated the algebra of Al-Khowarizmi into Latin. Mathematicians
used it all over the world until the sixteenth century.
Traditional
systems had used different letters of the alphabet to
represent numbers or cumbersome Roman numerals, and the
new system was far superior, for it allowed people to
multiply and divide easily and check their work. The merchant
Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa, who had learned about Arabic
numerals in Tunis, wrote a treatise rejecting the abacus
in favor of the Arab method of reckoning, and as a result,
the system of Hindu-Arabic numeration caught on quickly
in Central Italy. By the fourteenth century, Italian merchants
and bankers had abandoned the abacus and were doing their
calculations using pen and paper, in much the same way
we do today.
In
addition to his treatise on numerals, al-Khwarizmi also
wrote a revolutionary book on resolving quadratic equations.
These were given either as geometric demonstrations or
as numerical proofs in an entirely new mode of expression.
The book was soon translated into Latin, and the word
in its title, al-jabr, or transposition, gave the entire
process its name in European languages, algebra, understood
today as the generalization of arithmetic in which symbols,
usually letters of the alphabet such as A, B, and C, represent
numbers. Al-Khwarizmi had used the Arabic word for "thing"
(shay) to refer to the quantity sought, the unknown. When
al-Khwarizmi's work was translated in Spain, the Arabic
word shay was transcribed as xay, since the letter x was
pronounced as sh in Spain. In time this word was abbreviated
as x, the universal algebraic symbol for the unknown.
Robert
of Chester's translation of al-Khwarzmi's treatise on
algebra opens with the words dixit Algorithmi, "Algorithmi
says." In time, the mathematician's epithet of his
Central Asian origin, al-Khwarizmi, came in the West to
denote first the new process of reckoning with Hindu-Arabic
numerals, algorithmus, and then the entire step-by-step
process of solving mathematical problems, algorithm.
The
Muslims of the 9th Century, including Abu al Wafaa' turned
Algebra into science. They created the zero and the decimal
point.
Abulwafaa
was the first person to demonstrate the sine theorom for
spherical triangle: sin (a+b) = sin a cos b - cos a sin
b. The word 'sine' is the exact translation of the arabic
word Jayb.
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