al-Khwarizmi's Book of Arithmetic (Algorismus)

The "Book of Arithmetic" of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi is one of four books by him that the editors of the Cairo edition of the Book of al-Jabr and al-Muqabala say have survived and that Ibn al-Nadim did not list in his Fihrist. ¹

The editors hold that the Indian method of reckoning, with the use of zero, reached the West through this book, and that Westerners learned arithmetic from it in Latin translation and from other books built on it. ² Among these are the Carmen de Algorismo of Alexander de Villa Dei, about 1220 CE, and the Algorismus vulgaris of John of Halifax, about 1250; both are based on Muhammad ibn Musa's book on arithmetic and remained standard teaching texts for centuries. ^{2 3}

The editors note that al-Khwarizmi's name became a word in the dictionaries of most languages: in English "algorithm" for a set procedure for solving problems, while the poet Chaucer uses "augrim" for zero; the numerals 1 to 9 were called Algorismus in Latin until the early eighteenth century; and the Spanish word for numbers or figures is guarismo. ² In their view all these words are corruptions of his name. ²

The text of the book itself was not read here; everything on this page comes from the introduction to the Cairo edition of the Algebra.