Al-Jabr

And speaking of counting, producer Adam has given me the following factoid.

The word algebra comes from the Arabic word al-jabr, meaning restoration, completion, or the reunion of broken parts.

Yes, but there was supposed to be a scholar in the name of al-jabr, right? Yeah.

I'm not

sure.

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.