Why are algorithms called algorithms? A brief history of the Persian polymath you’ve likely never heard of
Why are algorithms called algorithms? A brief history of the Persian polymath you’ve likely never heard of
Our modern lives are influenced by algorithms at every step. We can trace this influence back more than 1,200 years ago – to a Muslim mathematician.
For those who care about historically accurate takes, he only self-identified as a Muslim from Khwarazm. Self-identifying like that was the norm.
To call him Persian is a typical western post-christian modern take with its over-concern with everyone's supposed ethnicity/races.
He came from a region where Turkic people lived under the direct rule of the east-Persian Sunni Samanid amirate (under Abbasid suzerainty). So he probably was of some Turkic background, but we don't actually know. People at the time could move around freely, and many of them did.
15He spoke Farsi, and wrote Farsi. He was a Persian.
-2He spoke Arabic and written in Arabic too. Doesn't make him an Arab (It does actually if it was his native tongue, unlike Persian where to the best of my knowledge, merely speaking the language is not enough).
Arabic and Persian were the languages of science and the court under the Samanids. Some of that originally-Samanid Persian+Sunni influence actually persists until today. Persian is for example still today a primary, if not the primary, language in Religious schools/madrasas in the Indian subcontinent. Doesn't make the people there Persian.
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Wait wait wait, I thought “Algorithms” was the name of Al Gore’s calypso album.
7Boy, that joke. How low can you go.
2I’m not above scraping bottom
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Impressive effort.
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