Khwarazmi

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Relating to Khwarazm, the historical region south of the Aral Sea ; a Persian mathematician of the Abbasid era whose name gave us the word algorithm
2. Of or from Khwarazm, the ancient land around the lower Amu Darya ; a 9th-century scholar whose work in mathematics and astronomy is honored in the term algorithm
3. Pertaining to the old region of Khwarazm in Central Asia ; the celebrated Persian thinker Muhammad ibn Musa, a pioneer of algebra and namesake of algorithm

Etymology: Khwarazmi is the nisba, or "from" name, of the Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, who worked in Baghdad under the Abbasid caliphs around 780 to 850. The name means "from Khwarazm," the region south of the Aral Sea in present-day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and it was Latinized in the twelfth century as "Algorismus." Translators working on his arithmetic treatise, which introduced Hindu-Arabic numerals and place-value methods to the Latin West, turned his name into a word for any step-by-step calculating procedure. That is the real origin of "algorithm," and it shows how a personal name can outlive its owner. Europeans first knew the decimal method as "algorism," the art of computing with Arabic numerals, and the name gradually reshaped itself into the modern word by association with "arithmetic." The alteration was an accident of spelling and learned confusion, not a deliberate change of meaning.