Mathematic

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The Qu'ran itself encouraged the accumulation of knowledge, and a Golden Age of Islamic science and mathematics flourished throughout the medieval period from the 9th to 15th Centuries. The House of Wisdom was set up in Baghdad around 810, and work started almost immediately on translating the major Greek and Indian mathematical and astronomy works into Arabic.

The outstanding Persian mathematician Muhammad Al-Khwarizmi was an early Director of the House of Wisdom in the 9th Century, and one of the greatest of early Muslim mathematicians. Perhaps Al-Khwarizmi's most important contribution to mathematics was his strong advocacy of the Hindu numerical system (1 - 9 and 0), which he recognized as having the power and efficiency needed to revolutionize Islamic (and, later, Western) mathematics, and which was soon adopted by the entire Islamic world, and later by Europe as well.

Al-Khwarizmi's other important contribution was algebra, and he introduced the fundamental algebraic methods of "reduction" and "balancing" and provided an exhaustive account of solving polynomial equations up to the second degree. In this way, he helped create the powerful abstract mathematical language still used across the world today, and allowed a much more general way of analyzing problems other than just the specific problems previously considered by the Indians and Chinese.
The 10th Century Persian mathematician Muhammad Al-Karaji worked to extend algebra still further, freeing it from its geometrical heritage, and introduced the theory of algebraic calculus. Al-Karaji was the first to use the method of proof by mathematical induction to prove his results, by proving that the first statement in an infinite sequence of statements is true, and then proving that, if any one statement in the sequence is true, then so is the next one.
Among other things, Al-Karaji used mathematical induction to prove the binomial theorem. A binomial is a simple type of algebraic expression which has just two terms which are operated on only by addition, subtraction, multiplication and positive whole-number exponents

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⏰ Last updated: Mar 08, 2015 ⏰

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