Hidayah Blog

Assalamu-Alaykum (Peace be Upon you)

During the course of the daily amount of loitering I do on the Web I came across the fact that Alexis Lemaire, AKA: The Human Calculator has broken the record for finding the 13th root of a 200-digit - I think to say that it is a ‘difficult’ feat is somewhat of an understatement.

So then I started to think of the ‘ human calculators’ of the past, and to my delight I found that the word ‘algebra’ is actually a Latin variant of the Arabic word ‘al-jabr’. This came from the title of a book, ‘Hidab Al-Jabr Wal-Muqabala‘ written in Baghdad about 825 AD by the great Muslim mathematician Mohammed Ibn-Musa Al-Khowarizmi.

Incidentally, resulting from the works of the great Khowarizmi, we are left with the word ‘algorithm‘ which came about as time and language had its effect, like so:

Al-Khowarizmi (Arabic) to Algoritmi (Latin) to Algorithm (English)

And Allah knows best

Ma’as-salaam

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Did You Know?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.