Today we ride east with merchants and translators to a city on the Tigris whose libraries smelled of paper and oil lamps, where geometry was read by day and stars were measured by night, where officials argued about taxes with the same intensity that scholars argued about proofs. The city is Baghdad in the early ninth century, the Abbasid court’s restless mind made into streets and courtyards, and the scholar at the center of our hour is Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al‑Khwarizmi. If Aryabhata taught a civilization to sing its methods in verse, al‑Khwarizmi will teach another civilization to write its methods in prose so clear that clerks can carry them into courts and markets. Out of his pages will come two words so ordinary now we hardly notice their strangeness: algebra and algorithm.

By Selenius Media