Algorithm
Okay, probably it is not hard to figure out Arabic influence in the word “Algorithm”. Yes, due to the “Al” in the beginning. And that is mostly quite true with English words beginning with “Al”, unless your first name is Albert (which, by the way, is a name of Germanic origin, so no Arabic influence there).
However, the story of how the word Algorithm became popular in English is not that simple. It begins in the nineth century during the Islamic Golden Age when much of the Muslim world was experiencing remarkable progress in science, economics and culture. With the inauguration of House of Wisdom in Baghdad by the fifth Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid, the foundation for tradition of love for knowledge and preservation of ancient wisdom was laid down. Emissaries were sent all around the world to collect books and bring them back. The books were then translated and preserved for future generations. Scholars who translated books into Arabic were awarded gold coins equal to the book’s weight. And it was perhaps in those times that hardcovers were introduced. Well, maybe not.
But history bears witness that in the times when most of Europe was immersed in the obscurity of the Dark Ages, struggling with famine, disease and war, the Islamic world was busy building upon the ancient Greek and Indian knowledge. One of the most famous scholars of those times known today was the Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi whose book “The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing” laid the foundation for Algebra. The word Algebra, by the way, is derived from the Arabic word “al-jabr”, meaning “restoration”, which refers to adding one number on both sides of an equation in order to balance it.
But we are more interested here in his other book titled “kitab fi istemal al adad al hindi” (Book on the use of Hindi numerals). The term “Hindi numerals” might sound a bit odd today but in those days, the discovery of decimal numbers (zero through nine) from India was a more recent event. The decimal system for understanding numbers was found to be quite simple since the zero made it easy to write big numbers. Counting started all over again after every ten which made it handy for those who used ten fingers to count.
This book of Al-Khwarizmi was translated into Latin in the 12th Century and was titled “Algoritmi de numero Indorum” (Algoritmi on the Indian numbers), the word “Algoritmi” being the translator’s way of saying “Al-Khwarizmi”. While the title sounds ambiguous in English, it is equally ambiguous in Latin. Ambiguity took over and in Medieval Latin the word “algorismus” was beginning to be used to denote the decimal number system. The next twist in the tale of Algorithm’s etymology comes in the 15th Century when due to influence of the Greek word “Arithmos” (meaning number; English “arithmetic” is derived from the same Greek word), the Latin “algorismus” became “algorithmus”. And English claimed the word by simply removing the “us” from the end. (I wonder what the English speaking world would call this magazine had it been in Latin.)
It is amazing how three different languages that enjoyed the status of the ultimate language of knowledge in three different times have left their mark on one single word: Algorithm. Greek, the language that was immortalized by giants like Plato and Aristotle; Latin, the language that Europized the scientific knowledge of the world during the late Middle Ages; and Arabic, the language, had it not been for whose speakers, the flame lit by ancient Greek scientists would have been extinguished in the mayhem of the Dark Ages.
So the next time you see, hear or say the word Algorithm, remind yourself of the most widely read mathematician in Europe in the late Middle Ages, distortion of whose name became synonymous with “method”.