Origin of Algebra

Mohammed al-Khwarizmi gave us the words (and techniques of) algebra and algorithms. He was a scholar at The House of Wisdom in Baghdad and brought together ideas from Babylon, India and Greece.

Two of al-Khwarizmi's most influential books were Al-jabr wa'l Muqabalah, which gave its name to algebra, and Al-Khwarizmi on the Hindu Art of Reckoning, from which we get the word algorithm (based on his name).

He helped bring the idea of zero into mathematics; although a symbol for zero had been introduced by the Babylonians, it was Indian mathematicians who had started using it as a number in the 6th century.