algebra

[16] Algebra symbolizes the debt of Western culture to Arab mathematics, but ironically when it first entered the English language it was used as a term for the setting of broken bones, and even sometimes for the fractures themselves (‘The helpes of Algebra and of dislocations’, Robert Copland, Formulary of Guydo in surgery 1541). This reflects the original literal meaning of the Arabic term al jebr, ‘the reuniting of broken parts’, from the verb jabara ‘reunite’. The anatomical connotations of this were adopted when the word was borrowed, as algebra, into Spanish, Italian, and medieval Latin, from one or other of which English acquired it. In Arabic, however, it had long been applied to the solving of algebraic equations (the full Arabic expression was ’ilm aljebr wa’lmuqābalah ‘the science of reunion and equation’, and the mathematician al- Khwarizmi used aljebr as the title of his treatise on algebra – see ALGORITHM), and by the end of the 16th century this was firmly established as the central meaning of algebra in English.