Al-Khwarizmi — the Persian whose name became "algorithm" | PERSIA'S GREATEST MINDS Part 1

History Onion · Part 1 Al-Khwarizmi · 2:53

Your phone is running algorithms right now. The word isn't a technical term — it's a man's name, worn down by a thousand years of European tongues. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was born around 780 in Khwarezm, on the eastern edge of the Iranian world. He spent his working life at the court of the caliph al-Ma'mun in Baghdad, and the book he wrote there gave us the word algebra — from al-jabr, "the restoring". But about half of that book is inheritance law. Al-Khwarizmi says so himself in the opening pages: he wrote it for what people actually needed — inheritance, legacies, dividing property, lawsuits and trade. Islamic inheritance rules split an estate into exact fractions across a long list of relatives, and working those fractions out means solving equations. What was actually new in it: before al-Khwarizmi, each problem got its own trick. He showed they all collapse into six standard shapes, and wrote one procedure for each that works on any numbers at all — then proved every one geometrically, by drawing a square and laying rectangles along its sides. All of it in longhand prose. There was no equals sign yet, and no x.