Historical note: The word algorithm comes from the name of Abu Ja’far
Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khowarizmi, an Arabic mathematician who lived over
1000 years ago; algorithm is from al-Khowarizmi, which means “from Khowarismi”,
a town which is located in modern day Uzbekistan. The reason his name
became synonymous with method was because his math books actually
gave methods for solving types of problems, which was very rare in his day.
Before al-Khowarizmi, and even after, many math books were collections of
problems without solutions, where the author was, in effect, challenging
the reader to prove that he (or she) was as smart as the author, who knew
all this cool stuff. This is not true of every ancient math book; Euclid’s
Elements, which is full of theorems and proofs and is the template for modern
mathematics, pre-dates al-Khowarizmi by well over a millenium. Still,
al-Khowarizmi’s style was different enough from his contemporaries to be
noted, and we honor his ancient work in the very up-to-date word algorithm.
(One student once guessed it was in honor of Al Gore, but this is not the
case, and the rumor should not be repeated.)
