Muhammad Ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi
(sample biosketch)
Andrew L. Cooksy
Muhammad Ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi was a Persian mathematician living in Baghdad in the 800s
who brought together extensive knowledge from Europe and Asia, along with his own
contributions, to establish and organize the foundation of modern algebra and trigonometry.
Little is known for certain about Al-Khwarizmiàlife. It is believed that he was born around 780
in an area of ancient Persia that now lies in modern Turkmenistan. By the early 800s, he was
living in Baghdad, a cosmopolitan center of trade. He took advantage of the trade routes through
Baghdad to travel to India and China, and eventually found a position in the House of Wisdom, a
a library and perhaps academy, established by the Abbasid Caliphate. While there, he supervised
the translation into Arabic of numerous works from India and Greece on mathematics,
astronomy, and geography. Among his many contributions, one of his books on using the HinduArabic numeral system for arithmetic led to the adoption of the modern numeric notation in the
West (and later worldwide). He died around 850.
His work eventually led to his development of a general approach for analyzing and solving
numerical problems. Where earlier Chinese and Hindu mathematicians had formulated solutions
to specific problems in math, Al-Khwarizmi recognized that there could be a systematic
approach to solving these problems for essentially any number. Much of this work revolved
around solving problems involving squares, and he developed the system of completing a square
to solve for values of an unknown variable. This systematic approach demonstrated that these
math problems could be approached using a relatively small set of rules, laying the groundwork
for modern algebra and articulating some of those fundamental rules that we use today.
His works were written primarily between the years 813 and 833, and were translated into Latin
in the 12th century, and his impact on modern science and mathematics is felt everywhere. The
term lgebra)s derived from the title of one of his books, and the word lgorithm)s itself a
Roman form of his name. His is one of the most profound examples of how studies of the
natural world shifted in ancient times from Greece and China to the Middle East, where they
matured for export back to the rest of the world 400 years later.
Al-Khwarizmiàwork was made possible by the combination of two factors: the tradition in the
ancient Islamic world of establishing centers of learning, and the unique position of Baghdad as
the capital of the Abbasid dynasty and therefore a prime destination for merchants from Asia and
eastern Europe.

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