ABU JAFAR

MUHAM

MAD IBN

MUSA AL-

KHWARIZM

I

LIFE

He was born in the year 780AD in Chorasmia in Persian family. Half way through his life he moved to Baghdad. In the Baghdad’s House Of Wisdom he invented some new things about maths, geography, arithmetic, astronomy and trigonometry. Then in 850AD he died at the age of 70.

ALGEBRA He invented algebra.

The word "algebra" comes from a Latin translation of the title of his mathematical treatise.

A translation of Al-Khwarizmi's name itself gives us the word "algorithm.”

GEOGRAPHYThe Kitab ṣurat al-Arḍ, translates as Book of the appearance of the Earth, with its cities, mountains, seas, all the islands and rivers, written by Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, according to the geographical treatise written by Ptolemy the Claudian.

The book opens with the list of latitudes and longitudes, in order of "weather zones", that is to say in blocks of latitudes and, in each weather zone, by order of longitude.

He revised and completed version of Ptolemy's Geography, consisting of a list of 2402 coordinates of cities and other geographical features following a general introduction.

TRIGONOMETRYAl-Khwarizmis Zij al-Sindhind contains tables for the trigonometric functions of sines and cosine.

A related treatise on spherical trigonometry is also attributed to him.

ASTRONOMY

Al-Khwarizmi’s Zij al-Sindhind is a work contains tables for the movements of the sun, the moon and the five planets known at the time.

This work marked the turning point in Islamic astronomy.

Hitherto, Muslim astronomers had adopted a primarily research approach to the field, translating works of others and learning already discovered knowledge.