Tag: Al-Khwarizmi

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (Persian: محمد بن موسى خوارزمی; c. 780 – c. 850), or simply al-Khwarizmi, was a polymath who produced vastly influential Arabic-language works in mathematics, astronomy, and geography. Around 820 CE, he was appointed as the astronomer and head of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the contemporary capital city of the Abbasid Caliphate.

His popularizing treatise on algebra, compiled between 813–33 as Al-Jabr (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing),^: 171 presented the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations. One of his achievements in algebra was his demonstration of how to solve quadratic equations by completing the square, for which he provided geometric justifications.^: 14 Because al-Khwarizmi was the first person to treat algebra as an independent discipline and introduced the methods of "reduction" and "balancing" (the transposition of subtracted terms to the other side of an equation, that is, the cancellation of like terms on opposite sides of the equation), he has been described as the father or founder of algebra. The English term algebra comes from the short-hand title of his aforementioned treatise (الجبر Al-Jabr, transl. "completion" or "rejoining"). His name gave rise to the English terms algorism and algorithm; the Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese terms algoritmo; and the Spanish term guarismo and Portuguese term algarismo, both meaning "digit".

In the 12th century, Latin-language translations of al-Khwarizmi's textbook on Indian arithmetic (Algorithmo de Numero Indorum), which codified the various Indian numerals, introduced the decimal-based positional number system to the Western world. Likewise, Al-Jabr, translated into Latin by the English scholar Robert of Chester in 1145, was used until the 16th century as the principal mathematical textbook of European universities.

Al-Khwarizmi revised Geography, the 2nd-century Greek-language treatise by the Roman polymath Claudius Ptolemy, listing the longitudes and latitudes of cities and localities.^: 9 He further produced a set of astronomical tables and wrote about calendric works, as well as the astrolabe and the sundial. Al-Khwarizmi made important contributions to trigonometry, producing accurate sine and cosine tables and the first table of tangents.