The Genius of the East

The ancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece created the basic language of number and calculation. When ancient Greece fell into decline, mathematical progress stopped. But that was in the West.

In the East, Mathematics would reach dynamic new heights. But in the West, much of this mathematical heritage has been forgotten or shaded from view.

The Great Wall of China, the vast, defensive wall that was built to protect China's growing empire. This wall is an amazing feat of engineering built over rough and high countryside. As soon as they started building, the ancient Chinese realized they had to make calculations about distances, angles of elevation and amounts of material used. This inspired some very clever mathematicians to help build Imperial China. At the heart of ancient Chinese Mathematics was an incredibly simple number system that laid the foundations for the way we count today.

Like the Chinese, the Indians had discovered the mathematical benefits of the decimal place-value system. It has been suggested that the Indians learned the system from Chinese merchants traveling in India with their counting rods. We may never know how the Indians came up with their number system, but we do know that they refined and perfected it, creating the ancestors for the nine numerals used across the world now.

The Indian system of counting was one of the greatest intellectual innovations; developing into the closest thing, we could call a universal language. However, there was one number missing, and it was the Indians who introduced it to the world.

Muhammad Al-Khwarizmi.

Have you heard about him before? Was his name published in any Mathematics textbook? Do the grade schoolers or college students know about him and what he had contributed to Mathematics? Neither do I. Like what I said earlier, much of the discoveries in the East were forgotten or were hidden from view.

Al-Khwarizmi was an exceptional mathematician who was responsible for introducing two key mathematical concepts to the West. In fact, these numbers were known as the Hindu-Arabic numerals. These numbers – one to nine and zero - are the ones we use today all over the world. But Al-Khwarizmi was to create a whole new mathematical language. It was called Algebra and was named after the title of his book Al-jabr W'al-muqabala, or Calculation by restoration or reduction. Algebra is the grammar that underlies the way that numbers work. It was a huge breakthrough. He developed systematic ways to be able to analyze problems so that the solutions would work whatever the numbers that you took. This language is being used across the mathematical world today.

Omar Khayyam took up the challenge of cracking the problem of the cubic. Unbelievably, Khayyam was a poet. He was the author of the great epic poem “Rubaiyat”. Khayyam's major mathematical work was devoted to finding the general method to solve all cubic equations.

Fibonacci promoted the new number system, demonstrating how simple it was, compared to the Roman numerals that were in use across Europe. Calculations were far easier, a fact that had huge consequences for anyone dealing with numbers -pretty much everyone, from mathematicians to merchants.