Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (Figure 1) lived in the ninth century AD in the country formerly known as Persia (present-day Iran). He is credited with being the first person to describe how equations and symbols could be manipulated using a technique called al-jabr (algebra). Mathskit on pages 12–15 is about using algebra in physics problems, and you will find examples of algebra in other articles too.
Algebra is just one of many scientific words and ideas that originated in Arabic countries around 800–1000 AD. For example, many bright stars are known today by names given to them by Arabic astonomers (Figure 2), and a book by tenth-century Persian astonomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi is regarded as an important foundation for the study of stellar motion.
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