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Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
Modern life owes a lot to Al-Khwarizmi and his fellow scholars who worked and studied in the House of Wisdom in the early 800's CE. This time was the Islamic Golden Age and the place is what is now Iraq but was then a part of the Persian Empire. These scholars revolutionised the digital number system using the arabic-indic numbers ٠(0), ١(1), ٢(2), ٣(3), ٤(4), ٥(5), ٦(6), ٧(7), ٨(8), and ٩ (9). Inventing the concept and use of 0, which is one of the most important parts of our decimal counting system!
Al-Khwarizmi himself made important discoveries and wrote many books on areas such as Algebra, Arithmetic (Math), Astronomy, Trigonometry, Geography, The Jewish calendar and more. The word algebra itself comes from the title of his book "Kitab al-Jabr wa-al-muqabala" or "The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing".
Likey born in Khwarezm, in current Uzbekistan (Muhammad related to Musa from the Khwarizmi area/family), his last name is where we get the word algorithm from. Algorithms are precise, unambiguous step by step instructions. All computer programs are machine-readable algorithms. In computer science, it is one of the fundamental areas of study. He described how to do many math algorithms, like how to do long division and multiplication (like "carry the one").
What makes our decimal system so useful is place value and the easy conversion between 100s, 10s, 1s, 10ths etc. and the place value holder of 0, and that was all thanks to the hard work of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi and other scholars in the House of Wisdom.
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