Many a school child in the English speaking world has come to revile the name of that famous bard. From Canterbury to Canberra, young minds taught in old ways have come to associate poorly taught, uninteresting English classed with the name “Shakespeare”. But what about that other great blight on the school calendar – that other class that makes boys and girls groan with disinterest and shake their heads with boredom? What about Maths? Perhaps given that Mathematicians are more preoccupied with doing sums and less with writing books to stick their names on the front, it is a little harder to find names of candidates against whom one can direct ones ire.
One candidate, who shaped the way the world understood its sums was the scholar Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, a mathematician, geographer and astronomer who lived between AD 780 and AD 850. Perhaps understandable for a man who built his life on numbers rather than words, relatively little is known about the life of the al-Khwārizmī. What is known is that he was of Persian origin and that he did much of his work at the aptly named “House of Wisdom”, a centre for academic knowledge that existed, at the time, in the city of Baghdad in what is now Iraq.
The House of Wisdom attracted scholars from all across the Islamic world and beyond, including from India and China, and scholars, such as al-Khwārizmī, worked to translate texts from ancient Greek and Sanskrit sources, further expounding on the knowledge learned until it was destroyed by the Mongol hordes of Hulagu Khan, grandson of the more renowned Ghenghis Khan during the siege of Baghdad in 1258 possibly because the Mongols in common with school children today, really didn’t like maths.
While it existed, the House of Wisdom’s function as a centre for collated academic knowledge, was to become the origin of the number system as we know it today. Recognizing the potential in efficiency and power of the Hindu numeric system, al-Khwārizmī introduced the symbols 1-9 and 0 into the mathematical lexicon of the Islamic world and from there they would later enter the western world, as Europe emerged from the dark ages.
As a prolific scholar, al-Khwārizmī wrote many books on different subjects many of which were later translated into the Latin, used by scholars in the west. For example, his well reguarded work the Kitāb ṣūrat al-Arḍ, or Book on the Image of the Earth, was a revised and completed version of the 2nd century Scholar, Ptolemy’s, Geography and contained co-ordinated latitudes and longitudes for all known major cities of the time.
But of his legacy, al-Khwārizmī is perhaps best known for the contribution to maths he made in his work Al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa-l-muqābala, which translates to the catchy title of “The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing”. The book focussed on calculation and its application in fields of trade, inheritance and more, but perhaps most notable, it was the origin of the term “Algebra”, which would so go on to terrify modern school children with its lack of real numbers.
Although al-Khwārizmī himself would not write his equations using the forms in methods, such as a + b = c , he nevertheless described and gave examples of how it should be done. Indeed it was from the term al-jabr that the Latinised form algebrae would develop, and from there to Algebra, as we know it throughout the English speaking world today.
But before we, and every frustrated pupil in every school and college across the country, condemn poor al-Khwārizmī for the uninteresting maths lessons we endure, let’s not forget that all the wonderful things in our modern world, from our architecture to our medicine to the very computers we use to read this article on, depend on the numeric and mathematical systems brought out by this, far too unknown, scholar. Indeed, without the work of mathematicians such as he, in bringing us the number zero, truly we would be nothing.
