Al-Khwarizmi composes Al-Jabr and founds algebra

Date

c. 820 CE

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

Mesopotamia (Iraq)

Era

Post-Classical / Medieval

Significance

Working at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad under the caliph al-Ma'mun, the Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi compiled, around 820, his treatise Al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa-l-muqabala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing).

It presented the first systematic method for solving linear and quadratic equations as a discipline in its own right, independent of geometry, and gave the world the word algebra, from al-jabr. In a separate work al-Khwarizmi explained the Hindu-Arabic decimal place-value system and the use of zero; the Latinised form of his name yielded the term algorithm. The House of Wisdom, which flourished as a translation centre and research academy under al-Ma'mun, brought Greek, Persian and Indian mathematics and astronomy into Arabic, and al-Khwarizmi's syntheses became foundational. Translated into Latin in twelfth-century Spain, his works transmitted both algebra and the numeral system to medieval Europe, reshaping commerce, science and mathematics. Al-Khwarizmi is consequently remembered as a father of algebra and one of the central figures of the Islamic Golden Age.

Empires active in c. 820 CE

• Tang Dynasty
  618 CE – 907 CE
• Byzantine Empire
  330 CE – 1453 CE
• Abbasid Caliphate
  750 CE – 1258 CE
• Kanem-Bornu Empire
  700 CE – 1900 CE
• Khazar Khaganate
  650 CE – 969 CE
• Uyghur Khaganate
  744 CE – 840 CE

Related science, technology & invention events

• First Islamic hospital (bimaristan) founded in Baghdad
  c. 805 CE
• The Diamond Sutra, the earliest dated printed book
  11 May 868 CE
• Brahmagupta codifies zero and arithmetic of negatives (Brahmasphutasiddhanta)
  628 CE
• Ibn al-Haytham Completes the Book of Optics
  c. 1021 CE
• Al-Zahrawi completes the Kitab al-Tasrif, foundational surgical encyclopedia
  c. 1000 CE
• Legendary origin of smallpox variolation (inoculation) in East Asia
  c. 1000 CE

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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