I have to be honest with you. When I saw the
topic for today's deep dive, I had this visceral
physical reaction, and it was not a good one.
It was that feeling, you know, sitting in a hard
plastic chair in ninth grade, staring at a whiteboard
and just having absolutely zero idea what was
going on. Let me guess. You saw the word algebra.
I saw the word algebra. And then right below
it, I saw the word algorithm. And I just thought,
OK, are we punishing the listeners today? Is
this remedial summer school? Because, I mean,
for most people, those two words are just the
bane of their existence. It's funny you say that
because you're right. For most of us, those words
represent stress. Tests. Confusing computer code,
we're told, runs our lives. Exactly. But when
you actually dig into the stack of research we
have today, you realize they aren't just dry
academic terms. They are, in fact, the legacy
of one specific guy. And see, that was the part
that actually hooked me. I always assumed algebra
was just, I don't know, a Greek word for headache
or algorithm with some modern tech speak. But
you're telling me they both trace back to a single
human being. A single human being. And not, you
know, a Greek philosopher in a toga and not a
coder in a hoodie in Silicon Valley. We are talking
about a Persian scholar, a librarian living in
Baghdad in the ninth century. The idea that the
source code for our entire modern world, literally
the math that lets us stream this audio to you
right now, was written down by a guy with a quill
pen and a scroll that is just wild. It really
is. We are diving into the life of Mohammed ibn
Musa al -Khwarizmi. And I think we really do
that by the end of this, you're going to stop
seeing X as this letter that haunts your nightmares.
I'm not making any promises. And start seeing
it as the tool that really unlocked the modern
world. That is a very tall order, but I'm here.
I'm here for it. I'm ready to be convinced. So
let's set the scene. We're not in ancient Greece.
We're not in Renaissance Europe. We are in the
Islamic Golden Age. Who was this man? So al -Khwarizmi
is born around 780 CE. And to really get a handle
on him, you have to understand the vibe of the
era. The vibe. I like that. Yeah. The Abbasid
Caliphate had just taken over a few decades earlier.
The capital had moved to the brand new purpose
-built city of Baghdad. And there was this...
This explosion of intellectual energy. It wasn't
just about conquering land anymore. It was about
conquering knowledge. Right. This is a major
pivot in history. And his name, Al -Khwarizmi,
that's not a first name, is it? It's more of
a descriptor. Exactly. In that era, names often
functioned like GPS coordinates for your identity.
Al -Khwarizmi pretty clearly implies he came
from a place called Khwarizm. Which, if I'm looking
at a modern map, is where exactly? It's a region
south of the Aral Sea. Today, it's essentially
split between modern Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
But back then, it was part of what we'd call
Greater Iran, a place with very deep, very old
Persian cultural and scientific roots. But I
remember reading in the notes that there's a
bit of a historical whoops regarding his identity,
something about a typo that messed up his biography
for centuries. Oh, this is a classic historian's
headache. That's a great little detective story.
So there was a later historian, a very famous
one named Altabari, who was cataloging all the
famous scholars. Right. He writes out Al -Khwarizmi's
full name, but then he adds this other tag at
the end, Al -Qatrubali. Which means? It means
someone from Quatrubal. which was a district
right outside Baghdad, a sort of wine -growing
suburb. Wait, he's from Central Asia and from
a Baghdad suburb. Exactly the problem. For a
long, long time, historians were scratching their
heads. They were thinking, okay, is he the guy
from Khwarazm or is he the guy from Khartoubal?
because you can't really be from both places
at once unless you have a very, very complicated
commute. It's like being called the New Yorker
from Texas. It doesn't make sense. Precisely.
But modern scholars, people like Rashi Rasht,
went back to the original manuscripts, and they
realized something. It's highly, highly probable
that a scribe somewhere down the line just missed
a single tiny letter, the letter wa. Which is
just the word for and? Just the word and. It
should likely have read... meaning Al -Tabari
was probably listing two completely different
people in his catalog. Wow. But because someone
a thousand years ago forgot a conjunction, we've
spent centuries debating where this one guy was
born. Yeah. It's a humbling lesson in history.
That is terrifying. One typo and your entire
identity gets merged with your neighbor. But
you mentioned another name there, Al -Majuzi.
That's another interesting tag, isn't it? It
is. Very interesting one. Al -Majuzi translates
to the Magian, or more specifically, the Zoroastrian.
Wait, hold on. I thought al -Khwarizmi was this
prominent scholar working for the Islamic caliph
in the capital of the Islamic world. He was,
absolutely. And if you read the preface to his
book on algebra, it's incredibly orthodox. He
praises Allah. He blesses the Prophet Muhammad.
There is absolutely no doubt he was a practicing,
devout Muslim. So why call him the Zoroastrian?
Is it an insult? It's more likely a reference
to his heritage. You have to remember, the Muslim
conquest of Persia had happened a century or
so before, but the cultural transition was still
ongoing. It's very possible his ancestors, or
maybe even al -Khwarizmi himself as a young child,
were Zoroastrian before converting to Islam.
It just paints such a rich picture of a melting
pot, doesn't it? You have this person with...
Persian heritage and Islamic faith, living in
this new Arab capital, and he ends up working
at the most famous think tank in history. The
house of wisdom, Beit al -Hikmah. Yeah, and I
think calling it a library really, really undersells
it. It absolutely does. When I hear library,
I think of a quiet room with a lady shushing
me. This sounds more like, I don't know, Bell
Labs meets the British Museum. That's a much
better comparison. This was a government -funded
super lab. The caliph at the time, Amal Moon.
was obsessed and i mean completely obsessed with
science and philosophy i heard there was a story
about a dream the story goes that he had a dream
where aristotle himself appeared to him no yes
And after this dream, he became convinced that
he needed to gather and translate all the wisdom
of the ancients into Arabic. He sent emissaries
to Byzantium, to India, everywhere, paying in
gold to bring back manuscripts. And al -Khwarizmi's
job, starting around 820 CE, was to be a lead
scholar in this massive operation. He was the
head astronomer and the head of the library,
the collection of books. His job wasn't just
to stamp books and put them on a shelf. It was
to take Greek geometry, Indian numbers, Persian
astronomy, and somehow make them all talk to
each other. He wasn't just a translator. He was
a synthesizer. That is the absolute key to understanding
him. He's sitting at the crossroads of all these
civilizations with all this knowledge flowing
into Baghdad. And that unique position is what
allowed him to write the book that changed everything.
Okay, let's get into the book, the big one. I'm
going to say the name. Al -Kitab al -Muqtarfavi
sab al -Jabru wal -Muqabba. Which just rolls
right off the tongue. Hidden in that very long
title is that one little word, aljab. Yes, aljab.
And that is, of course, where we get our word
algebra. Now, I have always associated algebra
with solving for X. That's what it is to me.
But what did the word aljabr actually mean to
a 9th century Persian scholar? It couldn't have
meant math class. No, no, it didn't. It's actually
a very practical, almost physical term. It means
restoration or reunion of broken parts. I think
I read it was a medical term. It was. The person
who set broken bones was a Mujabir. So al -Jab
is the act of setting a bone. Setting a bone.
How does that relate to math? How do you set
the bone of an equation? Okay, so visualize a
scale, a balancing scale, or just a simple equation.
Let's say you have something like x squared equals
40x minus 4x squared. Okay, I'm visualizing,
and I see a problem. We have a negative term
on that right side, that minus 4x squared. It's
messy. It's broken, to use your term. It's a
deficiency. In Al -Khruizmi's mind, a negative
term is a hole in the equation that needs to
be filled. So you perform all -job restoration.
You add 4x squared to the right side to get rid
of the negative. But then the scale is unbalanced.
Exactly. So to keep the balance, you must also
add it to the left side. You are restoring the
term by moving it over. So you're healing the
negative number. The equation becomes 5x squared
equals 40x. Everything is positive and whole
again. You've restored it. that's al job okay
that makes so much sense so what about the second
part of the title the wall mukabala that means
balancing or confronting it's basically reduction
The next cleanup step. Okay, give me an example.
So say you have x squared plus 14 equals x plus
5. You have plain numbers, constants on both
sides. Mookabala is canceling them out. You subtract
5 from the 14 and also from the 5 on the other
side. So you're left with x squared plus 9 equals
x. You've simplified it. You've balanced it.
It's just housekeeping, like you said, tidying
up the equation. But why was this considered
so revolutionary? I mean, the Greeks had been
doing math for a thousand years. Didn't Euclid
or Pythagoras figure this stuff out? This is
the absolute crux of his genius. The Greeks were
brilliant, but they had a self -imposed limitation.
They were obsessed with geometry. Meaning shapes,
lines, circles, triangles. Meaning physical shapes.
For a Greek mathematician, a number wasn't just
an abstract concept. It had to be something you
could draw on the sand. So x squared wasn't just
a number multiplied by itself. It was literally
a square. A physical shape with four sides. And
X was a line. Okay. I'm with you. So now imagine
trying to add X squared plus X. In the Greek
mindset, you are asking to add a flat two -dimensional
square shape to a one -dimensional straight line.
You can't do that. You can't. It's physically
impossible. It's like asking a construction worker
to add a square foot of carpet to a linear foot
of fence. It's nonsensical. They're just different
categories of things. Exactly. They exist in
different dimensions. But Al -Khwarizmi, he didn't
care. He had this incredible insight. He realized
that if you strip away the geometry, if you just
treat these things as abstract objects, you can
add them. You can manipulate them according to
a set of rules. So he basically created a virtual
reality for numbers. He said, forget the carpet
and the fence for a second. In this abstract
world I'm building, we can combine these things.
That is the aha moment. That's the paradigm shift.
He liberated mathematics from the physical world.
He created a unifying theory that allowed rational
numbers, irrational numbers, and geometric magnitudes
all to be treated as the same kind of thing,
algebraic objects. But here's the thing that
really blew my mind when I was reading the research.
If I went back in time to 825 CE and opened his
book, the compendious book on calculation, I
wouldn't recognize it as a math book. No, you
absolutely would not. You'd think you're reading
a book of logic puzzles or maybe a legal text.
Because there are no symbols. None. Not a single
one. No plus sign, no minus sign, no division
symbol, no equal sign, and definitely, definitely
no X or Y. So how on earth do you write an equation?
How do you even do this? He used what we now
call rhetorical algebra. He wrote everything
out in full descriptive sentences. Okay, give
me an example. How would you write something
simple, like x squared plus 10x equals 39? He
would write, and I'm quoting a translation here,
a square and 10 of its roots are equal to 39
birams. Roots? Birams? What are those? The root,
or shea in Arabic, which means thing, is the
unknown. It's rx. The thing you're looking for.
Yes. The square is, of course, that thing multiplied
by itself, rx squared. And dirham, which was
the local currency, was just used to represent
a simple unit, a plain number. That sounds absolutely
exhausting to read and write. It is incredibly
dense. There's a famous problem in the book that
goes something like this. If someone says...
I have divided 10 into two parts and have multiplied
one of them by itself. It is equal to the other
taken 81 times. My brain just short -circuited
trying to parse that sentence. Right. You have
to hold the entire logical structure in your
head just to figure out what the equation even
is. 10 less thing multiplied by itself. But what's
amazing is that despite the lack of symbols,
his logic was flawless. He categorized every
possible linear and quadratic equation into six
standard forms. And for each one, he gave a step
-by -step recipe for solving it. He created the
first instruction manual for solving these things.
The first algorithm, really. Which brings up
a bit of a title fight. We call Alcorazmi the
father of algebra. But I've had people tell me,
actually, no, it was Diophantus. He was a Greek
mathematician living in Alexandria centuries
earlier. Why does Alcorazmi get the trophy? It's
a debate that gets... Pretty heated in math history
circles, but it comes down to purpose. Okay.
Diophantus wrote a brilliant book called Arithmetica,
and he definitely solved some very complex algebraic
type problems. But here is the key distinction.
Diophantus was interested in number theory. He
was solving specific puzzles. He wanted to find
specific, elegant... integer solutions to specific
riddles. So he was like a guy who is incredibly
good at doing the Sunday crossword or Sudoku.
That's a great analogy. He's a master puzzle
solver. But Alcrisis wasn't just solving puzzles.
He was teaching a method. He was the first to
treat algebra as a discipline in its own right,
for its own sake. He wasn't looking for one specific
answer. He was showing you the general theory
of how all equations of a certain type work.
So Diophantus gave you a fish. But Al -Khwarizmi
taught you how to fish. Perfectly put. He wrote
the textbook, not the puzzle book. The historian
Carl B. Boyer said that Al -Khwarizmi's work
is much closer to the elementary algebra of today
than the works of either Diophantus or the Indian
mathematician Brahmagupta. And it was a textbook
with a purpose. This wasn't just ivory tower
theory. The caliph encouraged him to write this
book because people had real everyday problems
to solve. Very real problems. The book is full
of practical examples. What kind of problems
are we talking about? Things like digging canals
of a certain volume, measuring the area of different
shapes of land for farming or taxation, business
deals, trade. But the biggest one, and the one
that takes up a huge chunk of the second half
of the book, is inheritance. Inheritance. You
need algebra to figure out who gets grandma's
antique lamp. In 9th century Islamic law, oh
yes, it was notoriously complex. The Quran lays
out very specific fractional shares for every
relative. For example. A wife gets one -eighth
of the estate if there are children, but one
-fourth if there aren't. A daughter gets half
of what a son gets. Parents get one -sixth each.
It goes on and on. Okay, I can see how that gets
messy really, really fast. Especially if you
have a wife, two daughters, a mother, and a brother,
and the estate is, I don't know, a farm and 30
camels. It gets incredibly messy. You end up
with these really complex fractional equations
where you have to find a common denominator and
solve for an unknown share to make sure everyone
gets their exact legal right without You know,
having to cut a camel in half. Alcor Rizmi showed
step by step how algebra could solve these disputes
fairly and logically. So he wasn't just a mathematician.
He was essentially an estate lawyer, a surveyor,
a trade consultant. He was providing the foundational
tools for the entire legal and economic system
to function. It's the ultimate example of applied
mathematics. OK, so he gives us algebra. He liberates
numbers from shapes. He solves inheritance law.
That alone is a Hall of Fame career. But we started
this whole deep dive with two words, algebra
and algorithm. Yes, and it's fascinating. While
algebra comes from the title of his book, the
word algorithm comes from the man himself. It's
a corruption of his name, Al -Khwarizmi. It is.
His second great masterpiece was a book on arithmetic.
The original Arabic text is actually lost to
history, but it survived in Latin translations.
The most famous one was titled Algoritmo de Numero
Indorum. Which means? Al -Khwarizmi on the Hindu
art of reckoning. And the author's name, Al -Khwarizmi,
was Latinized into algorithm. And over time,
algorithm just morphs into algorithm. It does.
And in Spanish and Portuguese, it became Gorizmo,
which still means digit. His name literally became
the word for a number. So what was in this book
that was so revolutionary that his name became
synonymous with calculation itself? Because he
introduced the killer app of the Middle Ages
to the Western world, the Hindu -Arabic numeral
system. Our numbers, one through nine, and the
big hero of the story, zero. The one and only.
We take this completely for granted, but you
have to try to imagine doing math before this.
You're in Europe. You're a merchant in, say,
11th century Italy. You're using Roman numerals.
Ugh. I can barely read the Super Bowl number
in Roman numerals. It's a mess. Now try doing
long division. Divide MCMXLV by 14th. I wouldn't
even know where to begin. Is that even possible?
It's basically impossible. It's a complete nightmare.
The Roman system was okay for recording a number
once you had it, but it was terrible for actually
calculating with it. Al -Khwarizmi's book explained
the Indian system of place value. The idea that
a 1 in the tens column is worth 10 times as much
as a 1 in the ones column? Yes. And that system
only works because of the zero. It's the placeholder
that makes the whole thing click. The ultimate
game changer. And he didn't just explain the
numbers. He described a specific way to do these
calculations using a tool called ATTACK. A dust
board. Tell me about the dust board because this
is where I think the connection to modern computers
really becomes clear. So paper or parchment was
incredibly expensive. You didn't want to waste
it on scratch work. So people used a wooden board
covered in a thin layer of fine sand or dust.
You would write your numbers in the sand with
a stylus. Okay, like a primitive whiteboard.
Sort of. But here's the key feature. When you
did a step of a calculation, Let's say you're
carrying the one in addition. You would physically
erase the old number with your finger and write
the new result in its place. You're overwriting
the data in its memory location. You are literally
overwriting the data. Unlike in Abacus, where
all the beads stay there, the dust board had
a dynamic updating state. You erase the input
to create the output step by step. That is precisely
how computer RAM works. You have a memory address,
you write a value to it, you perform an operation,
and you overwrite that address with the new value.
The parallel is astounding. He was teaching people
how to process information in a step -by -step,
mechanical, repeatable way. Step one, write the
numbers. Step two, add the rightmost column.
Step three, erase the operands and write the
result. Step four, carry the one. That recipe.
That is an algorithm. And the people who adopted
this newfangled method in Europe were actually
called algarists? They were. And for a while,
they were the rebels. They were the cool kids
with the new tech. Was it controversial? Oh,
hugely. For centuries, there was a war between
the algarists and the abacists, the people who
were masters of the abacus and wanted to stick
to the old ways. I absolutely love the idea of
a medieval turf war between math nerds, guys
with beads versus guys with sandboards. It was
real. The abacists argued their method was more
reliable. less prone to error. But the Algarists
eventually won because their system was just
so much more powerful and efficient, especially
for multiplication and division. And it all came
from this one source. So much so that in the
Latin manuscripts that spread through Europe,
the text often began with the powerful phrase,
Dixit Algarismi. Thus spake Alquarismi. It sounds
biblical, doesn't it? It has the weight of a
commandment from a prophet. Do it this way because
Alquarismi, the master, said so. His name itself
became the authority on calculation. So every
single time a programmer writes a line of code
today or Amazon servers recommend me a pair of
shoes I don't need, they are unknowingly invoking
the name of this ninth century Persian librarian.
It is a direct line of descent. No question.
But he didn't stop at math. I mean, if you suddenly
have this new superpower, this ability to calculate
things that no one else could before. You're
going to want to apply it to everything. And
he did. He looked up at the sky. Astronomy. His
third major work was the Zei Asyntind. Zei is
basically a book of astronomical tables. And
that word syntynd, it sounds Indian. It is. It's
a corruption of the Sanskrit word satanta, which
means a similar kind of astronomical treatise.
So again, you see Al -Khwarizmi as the synthesizer.
So he's not inventing astronomy. He's upgrading
it. He's taking Indian astronomical methods and
data, mixing them with the great Ptolemaic model
of the universe and Persian observational traditions,
and creating this massive comprehensive guide.
It had 37 chapters and 116 tables with data for
the sun, the moon, and the five known planets.
But wasn't everyone doing star charts back then?
They were. But Al -Khwarizmi Zee introduced something
new and powerful to the Islamic world in this
book, trigonometry. Sines and cosines. Oh no,
more high school math trauma. Huh. But this was
a huge deal. For the first time, he included
accurate tables for the sine and cosine functions.
This allowed for much, much more precise calculations
of planetary positions, the timing of eclipses,
you name it. So this was another level -up moment.
A huge one. Before this, Islamic astronomy was
mostly just translating and preserving older
texts. After Al -Khwarizmi Zee, it became a true
research field. Later, astronomers started using
his methods to check the math of the ancients,
and they began finding errors. And once you start
correcting the ancients about the heavens, you
probably start wondering if they were wrong about
the earth, too. Exactly. Which leads us to his
fourth great work, his geography. He wrote the
Kitab Oryat Alar, the image of the earth. And
the ancient he was correcting here was the big
one, Ptolemy. Ptolemy was the gold standard for
geography for over a thousand years. But his
maps had some pretty serious problems. Al -Khwarizmi,
under the patronage of the caliph, oversaw a
massive state project, a team of 70 geographers,
to revise and remap the known world. 70 geographers.
That's a serious budget. What was the biggest
thing they fixed? The number one error was the
size of the Mediterranean Sea. Ptolemy had estimated
the length of the Mediterranean from the Pillars
of Hercules to the eastern shore to be about
63 degrees of longitude. And is that wrong? It's
way, way too long. It stretches Europe and Africa
out like they're made of taffy. It completely
discords the shape of the continents. Al -Khwarizmi's
team recalculated it to about 50 degrees. That's
a massive correction, more than 20%. It is. The
modern value is about 42 degrees, so he wasn't
perfect, but he was so much closer than the Greeks,
he got the scale of the world much more correct.
And I read something about the oceans that really
struck me. Ptolemy thought the Indian Ocean was
a lake. That's right. In Ptolemy's world, the
Indian Ocean and the Atlantic were depicted as
giant... landlocked seas. They were surrounded
by unknown lands, terra incognita. Which is such
a confining worldview. It means you're trapped.
There's nowhere else to go. It means there is
no sea route around Africa. It means the world
is fundamentally a closed system. Al -Khwarizmi
corrected this. In his work, he depicted them
as open bodies of water. And that's a total paradigm
shift. If the ocean is open, you can sail it.
You can explore it. You can trade across it.
It completely changes the economic and political
imagination of the world. And what's so cool
is that even though the original maps from his
book were lost to history, we still have his
data. Just the raw numbers. Yes. The book contains
a list of 2 ,402 coordinates. Just pages and
pages of latitudes and longitudes for cities,
mountains, rivers. And in the 20th century...
A scholar named Hubert Donick plugged all those
numbers into a computer to reconstruct the map.
Wow. And when you see it, it looks recognizable.
You can see the coastline of India, the Mediterranean.
It looks like our world, but seen through the
mathematical lens of the 9th century. It's amazing.
He's fixing the map of the earth, the map of
the heavens. He's fixing the legal code. I even
saw he did work on the Jewish calendar. He did.
He wrote a separate treatise on the Hebrew calendar
called Risalafi Istiklash Tarek Ayahud. He calculated
the metonic cycle, that's the 19 -year cycle
used to align the lunar and solar calendars,
and determined the rules for when the first day
of the month of Tishrei would fall. That just
speaks to his incredible intellectual curiosity.
Here he is, an Orthodox Muslim working for the
caliph, but he's diving deep into Hebrew timekeeping,
Indian numbers, Greek geometry. He really didn't
care where the truth came from, did he? He was
the ultimate pragmatist. If a tool worked, he
used it. If a number system was better, he adopted
it. And that open, synthetic attitude is what
ultimately saved this knowledge for the rest
of the world. So let's talk about that survival,
that transmission, because Baghdad, well, Baghdad
has a rough few centuries coming up. The Mongols
sack the city in 1258. The House of Wisdom is
destroyed. The Tigris River supposedly runs black
with the ink of all the books thrown into it.
How do we know any of this? We got incredibly
lucky. Before the destruction... the knowledge
had already leaked out. In the 12th century,
there was a massive translation movement in Europe,
specifically in Spain. Right, because much of
Spain was under Muslim rule for a long time.
It was a cultural bridge. Toledo, especially,
was a hub where Christian... Muslim and Jewish
scholars all mixed. And you had these ambitious
European scholars, guys like Robert of Chester
and Adelard of Bath, both Englishmen, traveling
to Spain specifically to hunt for these Arabic
manuscripts. It's a reverse intellectual commute.
We usually think of knowledge flowing from Europe
outwards. Here you have Englishmen going to Spain
to translate a Persian's book written in Arabic
so they can learn how to do basic math back home.
And when Robert of Chester translated Al -Jab
into Latin around 1145, it just... Just, it exploded.
It became the principal mathematics textbook
in the new European universities. For how long?
Until the 16th century. Wait, say that again?
For 400 years. That is just, it's almost impossible
to wrap your head around. That's like us today
using a science textbook written in the early
1600s. It just shows you how completely foundational
and revolutionary his work was. You literally
could not do the advanced science of the Renaissance
without it. You don't get Copernicus. You don't
get Kepler. You certainly don't get Newton without
Al -Khwarizmi first providing the basic language
of calculation. And the world has recognized
this, right? I mean, we talked about his name
becoming the word algorithm, but there are actual
physical monuments. There are. There is a crater
on the far side of the moon named Al -Khwarizmi.
Which is very fitting for an astronomer. There
are a couple of asteroids named after him. There
are statues of him in his ancestral homeland
of Uzbekistan, where he's a national hero. And
even one in Madrid. But I think his real monument
is invisible. What do you mean by that? I mean
the layer of abstraction that he placed over
the entire world. Explain that idea. Before him,
math was tied to the ground. It was about counting
sheep or measuring a physical field. It was concrete.
Alcorizmi was the one who built a layer above
that. A layer of pure symbols, of pure logic.
Thing and root and square. He separated the software
from the hardware. That is the perfect analogy.
He separated the logical software from the physical
hardware of the world. He was the first to show,
in a systematic way, that you can understand
and manipulate the world not by moving rocks,
but by manipulating symbols. That is the essence
of computer science. It's the essence of modern
physics. It's the essence of everything. It brings
us right back to that phrase, dixit algorithm.
Thus spake algorithm. It really is a provocative
thought to end on then. If those books hadn't
been translated in the 12th century, if Robert
of Chester had decided to stay home in England,
would we even have had a digital revolution?
It's the great what if of scientific history.
We might still be using the abacus. We might
still be stuck with Roman numerals struggling
to calculate simple interest on a loan. The incredible
acceleration of human progress over the last
500 years depends so heavily on these synthesizers.
These unique people who can stand at a crossroads
take disconnected ideas from different cultures
and forge them into a single, powerful, usable
tool. So the next time you open your laptop,
or you get frustrated with an algorithm that
feeds you the wrong song, or, God forbid, you
actually have to solve for X. Maybe just take
a second to nod to the librarian from 9th century
Baghdad. Muhammad ibn Musa al -Khwarizmi. The
man who wrote the source code for the modern
world. Thanks for diving deep with us. We'll
catch you on the next one.