Overview

During the Middle Ages, while the intellectuals of Christian Europe concerned themselves with theology and the common people with subsistence agriculture, a vibrant scientific and mathematical culture developed in the Islamic world. Among its achievements was the development of algebra, which would be reintroduced into Western mathematics through the Latin translation of a book, the al-jabr, by the ninth-century Persian astronomer and mathematician al-Khwarizmi.

Background

In its modern sense, algebra is the branch of mathematics concerned with finding the values of unknown quantities defined by the equations that they satisfy. Problems of an algebraic type are recognizable in the surviving mathematical writings of the Egyptians and Babylonians. Ancient Greek mathematics included the development of some algebraic concepts, but mainly in connection with geometry. The Greek mathematicians and philosophers were uncomfortable with the existence of irrational...