Al-Khwarizmi

And he traces this back further than you'd think.

The word algorithm comes from a 9th century Persian mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi.

But the modern version, the one shaping your feed, is basically a recipe for processing data that we've handed enormous power to.

And the early internet was the opposite of this, right? It was messy.

The House of Wisdom in Baghdad became this incredible intellectual hub.

Scholars like Al-Khwarizmi took the mathematical concepts from India, including that crucial concept of zero, merged them with Greek geometry and advanced them significantly.

He's the algebra guy, isn't

he? He is.

Whenever you look at a phone or a computer keyboard and you see those numerals, that is an Indian invention.

In just four or five jumps, you get from Renaissance Milan with Leonardo da Vinci to Piero della Francesco in Tuscany, Fibonacci in Algeria, Al-Khwarizmi in Baghdad, and then Aryabhatta and Brahmagupta in early India.

But we are not taught this.

I think history is like a map.

which then was known as Khwarazm.

And the guy who comes from Khwarazm is called al-Khwarizmi.

Al-Khwarizmi, who is probably a native Persian speaker, in Baghdad operates in Arabic.

And he translates these very, does more than translate, because he mixes Aryabhatta and Brahmagupta's insights with a little bit of Greek and other important Greek thinkers.

yes.

And what was his name? His name is Muhammad bin Musa al-Khawarizmi,

okay?

Algorithms, and he comes actually from a province in Persia called Khawarizm.

You know, the obvious application would be geometry and, and concept-based mathematics.

But we've built the largest library of math manipulatives, so even in the kind of foundational algebraic, uh, frameworks, we have a, a, a lesson where you're actually interfacing with Al-Khwarizmi and learning about algebra as the reckoning, and then that transitions to applying algebraic tiles to a particular lesson when you're factoring quadratics.

And so it's, again, a use case where we're taking abstraction, and we're making it accessible.

We're making it concrete.

They had all a bunch of negatives.

And in the previous books, there was, there were sections about Muslim contribution to science, Al-Khwarizmi, algorithm.

All of that's been taken out, and all of these negatives have been added.

And then Astaghfirullah, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam has...

Like Salah was the purpose of it.

Why do you think they were gazing at the stars and engaging in all these different calculations of the celestial orbits and trying to tell time in these interesting ways? Why do you think that was the primary case? What time Salah is? When is Ramadan? What are these obligations of worship? The whole system of algebra, you know that we talk about Khawarizmi and algorithm.

If you've ever studied Fiqh al-Mirah, the most complex algebra you'll ever be able to try and wrap your head around, and the arithmetic, it's very challenging.

Like, to be able to make the...

Do you know where algorithms come from? It comes from Muslims.

A Muslim scientist called Al-Khwarizmi, his name translation to algorithm.

Khwarizmi, algorithm, is just a translation of his name.

Where he also, you have the, the algebra.

It's a reminder that science and commerce often share the same linguistic pathways.

We can't ignore algorithm, whose roots lie in Al-Khwarizmi, the name of the Persian mathematician who wrote Al-Jabr.

The Latin translation of his work was called Algoritmi, which became Algorismus in medieval Latin and eventually algorithm in English.

This word hopped from Arabic to Latin to French before making its way into English during the Renaissance when scholars like John of Gaunt were fascinated by mathematical computation.