Al-Khwarizmi

Working at the House of Wisdom in al-Ma'mun's Baghdad in the early ninth century, al-Khwarizmi wrote foundational treatises on mathematics, astronomy, and geography. His book on al-jabr gave algebra its name, and the Latinized form of his own name gave us "algorithm." Little is known of his personal life beyond his scholarship.

Almost nothing is recorded of personal hardship; his life is known through his works. The struggle of his achievement was intellectual — systematizing calculation and abstracting the solving of equations into a general method.

Al-Khwarizmi treated the solving of equations as a systematic discipline and popularized the decimal positional number system taken from Indian mathematics. His approach made mathematics a set of general procedures — the very idea captured in the word "algorithm."

A scholar of the House of Wisdom, al-Khwarizmi had no part in war; his work belonged to the peaceful flourishing of science under Abbasid patronage.

Debates are technical and historical: the extent of his originality versus his synthesis of Greek, Indian, and Babylonian sources, and the sparseness of his biography. No authentic likeness of him survives, so no image accompanies this entry.

Al-Khwarizmi is a founder of algebra and a principal channel through which the decimal numerals and systematic calculation reached the wider world, including medieval Europe. The words algebra and algorithm are his monument, and modern computing rests on the concept his name now denotes.