Concept
Mathematics in the medieval Islamic world
Related concepts (17)
House of Wisdom
The House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Ḥikmah), also known as the Grand Library of Baghdad, was a major Abbasid public academy and intellectual center in Baghdad and one of the world's largest public libraries during the Islamic Golden Age. The House of Wisdom was founded either as a library for the collections of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid in the late 8th century or was a private collection created by al-Mansur (r. 754–775) to house rare books and collections of poetry in Arabic.
Hindu–Arabic numeral system
The Hindu–Arabic numeral system or Indo-Arabic numeral system (also called the Hindu numeral system or Arabic numeral system) is a positional decimal numeral system, and is the most common system for the symbolic representation of numbers in the world. It was invented between the 1st and 4th centuries by Indian mathematicians. The system was adopted in Arabic mathematics by the 9th century. It became more widely known through the writings of the Persian mathematician Al-Khwārizmī (On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals, 825) and Arab mathematician Al-Kindi (On the Use of the Hindu Numerals, 830).
Binomial theorem
In elementary algebra, the binomial theorem (or binomial expansion) describes the algebraic expansion of powers of a binomial. According to the theorem, it is possible to expand the polynomial (x + y)n into a sum involving terms of the form axbyc, where the exponents b and c are nonnegative integers with b + c = n, and the coefficient a of each term is a specific positive integer depending on n and b. For example, for n = 4, The coefficient a in the term of axbyc is known as the binomial coefficient or (the two have the same value).
Irrational number
In mathematics, the irrational numbers (from in- prefix assimilated to ir- (negative prefix, privative) + rational) are all the real numbers that are not rational numbers. That is, irrational numbers cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers. When the ratio of lengths of two line segments is an irrational number, the line segments are also described as being incommensurable, meaning that they share no "measure" in common, that is, there is no length ("the measure"), no matter how short, that could be used to express the lengths of both of the two given segments as integer multiples of itself.
Islamic Golden Age
The Islamic Golden Age was a period of scientific, economic and cultural flourishing in the history of Islam, traditionally dated from the 8th century to the 13th century. This period is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786 to 809) with the inauguration of the House of Wisdom, which saw scholars from all over the Muslim world flock to Baghdad, the world's largest city by then, to translate the known world's classical knowledge into Arabic and Persian.
Cubic equation
In algebra, a cubic equation in one variable is an equation of the form in which a is nonzero. The solutions of this equation are called roots of the cubic function defined by the left-hand side of the equation. If all of the coefficients a, b, c, and d of the cubic equation are real numbers, then it has at least one real root (this is true for all odd-degree polynomial functions). All of the roots of the cubic equation can be found by the following means: algebraically: more precisely, they can be expressed by a cubic formula involving the four coefficients, the four basic arithmetic operations, square roots and cube roots.
History of algebra
Algebra can essentially be considered as doing computations similar to those of arithmetic but with non-numerical mathematical objects. However, until the 19th century, algebra consisted essentially of the theory of equations. For example, the fundamental theorem of algebra belongs to the theory of equations and is not, nowadays, considered as belonging to algebra (in fact, every proof must use the completeness of the real numbers, which is not an algebraic property).