Today I Learned - Rocky Kev

TIL the origins of the term Algorithms

POSTED ON:

TAGS: history math trivia

In the year 800, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi figured out Pi (π) at five digits, or 3.1416.

That's pretty impressive, with π being useful for understanding the universe.

He wrote a book titled "The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing" which is among the first algebra books in history.

Sidenote: He also wrote a book called “On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals,” which is widely credited with spreading the decimal (base-10) numbering system used around the world today.

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi’s name is a reference to where he was from — “al-Khwarizm” means that he was from Khwarazm, a region roughly on the border of modern-day Uzbekistan and Turkmenista.

Al-Khwarizmi” was, somehow, recorded as something close to “Algorizmi,” which, in turn, became our all-purpose math word: algorithm.

Boom!

via Wondrium Daily, Pi: The Most Important Number in the Universe?

via Now I know, WHICH CAME FIRST, THE ALGORITHM OR THE PI?

Related TILs

Tagged: history

TIL why jpeg vs jpg

In DOS systems, a filename extension was a different part of the name stored in a different field that can only be 3 characters. You still see this legacy today in Microsoft's .NET software, where most system calls that use the word 'filename' in their name don't really mean the whole filename. They mean just the part without the extension.

TIL the first webcam

The Trojan Room coffee pot was a coffee machine located in the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, England. Created in 1991 by Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky, it was migrated from their laboratory network to the web in 1993 becoming the world's first webcam.

TIL the history of fonts

We came up with all sorts of clever techniques to do what was called 'image replacement' for text. Some of the techniques involved CSS and background images. One of the techniques involved Flash