The Word Algorithm Is Named After a Persian Mathematician

When you follow a recipe or use a search engine, you are executing a step-by-step procedure whose name travels back to 9th-century Baghdad. At the city's famed House of Wisdom, the Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi produced groundbreaking texts on mathematics. When his works detailing systematic processes for solving arithmetic problems were translated into Latin centuries later, European scholars Latinized his name to *Algoritmi*. The methods he described became known as the "method of Algoritmi," which gradually evolved into the modern word "algorithm," forever linking the concept of a precise procedure to the man who helped popularize it.

Al-Khwarizmi's linguistic legacy extends even further into our mathematical vocabulary. The word "algebra" is derived directly from the title of his most influential book on the subject, *Al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa'l-muqabala*. The key term, *al-jabr*, translates to "the reunion of broken parts." This originally referred to his specific technique of moving a negative term from one side of an equation to the other to make it positive, thus "reuniting" or restoring it. This single, elegant concept for balancing equations ultimately gave its name to an entire branch of mathematics.