ALGEBRA
From Philosopedia
ALGEBRA
The branch of mathematics concerned with operations on sets of numbers or other elements that are often represented by symbols was developed by medieval Islamic scholars and was named algebra (after al-jabr, an Arabic word meaning the reduction, the removing of an equation’s negative terms).
Jabr wa-al-Muqabalah (The Book of al-Jabr and al-Muqabalah), written approximately in 825 by the Persian mathematician Mohammed al-Khwarizmi (algorithm is taken from his name), contains word problems, because Arabic numerals had not yet been introduced, so numbers were represented by symbols.
